Rebuttal to Stallman’s Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI

Abstract

This blog post provides a rebuttal to Richard Stallman’s account of the origins of the Lisp machine companies Symbolics and LMI. Dan Weinreb, a founder of Symbolics, claims that Stallman’s account is highly biased and inaccurate. Weinreb disputes several claims made by Stallman, including the claim that Symbolics hired away all the hackers from the MIT AI Lab and that Symbolics was actively trying to destroy LMI. He also points out that Stallman’s version of Emacs was not a completely independent creation, but was based on prior work by Steele and Moon. Weinreb concludes that Stallman’s account of the founding of Symbolics and LMI is misleading and that the actions of both companies were not malicious. – AI-generated abstract.