Edit (a partial summary of the above link but not a direct quote):
It is really hard to bootstrap a top of the line computer company, especially when you need capital to pay for your own fab. Greenblatt insisted on bootstrapping and being CEO too, and many hackers at the Lab did not think he would be a good CEO. It had nothing to do with "backstabbing".
Symbolics hired AI Lab hackers full time because other AI spinoff companies were inappropriately using AI Lab resources, so Symbolics wanted to make sure this didn't happen. Hiring workers full time wasn't an "evil plan" to destroy the AI Lab, it was actually a well thought out ethical course of action.
Since MIT owned the source code to Lisp Machines (read: it was copyrighted and not free in any way), they licensed the software to several companies under the conditions that all proprietary changes could not be distributed to anyone else except MIT. AI Lab hackers got all the changes that came from a private company, so they didn't need to leave the lab to work on Lisp Machines. The AI Lab hackers had free will, too. No one forced them to leave, and Stallman's suggestion otherwise is actually really offensive. In fact, if LMI had been the only company, the same people would have left the lab.
Stallman thought that Symbolics's compliance with MIT's licensing agreement was actually an evil plot. His essentially wanted Symbolics to support LMI by giving them proprietary changes. If Symbolics had actually done this, they would have been shut down by MIT for breaking their licensing agreement. The same was true for LMI, which also had to make any changes proprietary. Stallman should have been angry at MIT, not Symbolics.
Stallman completely misunderstood this and his offensive (and quite possibly libelous) slander against honest and ethical Symbolics employees is a very off putting.
Symbolics was a huge company and developed an entire OS, architecture, and many programs for their platform that Stallman did not and could not copy. Stallman mainly copied some features from Zmacs (the text editor). Symbolics made high end machines that sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Nobody would have ditched an expensive Symbolics machine, one of the leading CG platforms of the 80s, because some other platform also an editor that sort of looked like Zmacs. Stallman had pretty much no impact on Symbolics's revenue.
Back in those days the serious CPUs were made from discrete logic, so both companies outsourced the construction of boards and I assume assembled them from there. ASICs came later (while I was at LMI TI consulted us about building a system on one or more of their gate arrays).
RMS did a bit more than copy new Zmacs features; Dan acknowledges "What he copied were incremental improvements: a new editor command here, a new Lisp utility there." and I e.g. remember something about a new condition system or the like.
A constant theme with RMS is his complete misunderstanding of basic business and economic principles.
I can't tell if Poe's Law is at work here. For all of RMS's 'misunderstanding' he's been so profoundly right that practically every single piece of hardware on the internet is a product to one degree or another of his understanding of economics and business in the internet age.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110719154038/http://danweinreb....
Edit (a partial summary of the above link but not a direct quote):
It is really hard to bootstrap a top of the line computer company, especially when you need capital to pay for your own fab. Greenblatt insisted on bootstrapping and being CEO too, and many hackers at the Lab did not think he would be a good CEO. It had nothing to do with "backstabbing".
Symbolics hired AI Lab hackers full time because other AI spinoff companies were inappropriately using AI Lab resources, so Symbolics wanted to make sure this didn't happen. Hiring workers full time wasn't an "evil plan" to destroy the AI Lab, it was actually a well thought out ethical course of action.
Since MIT owned the source code to Lisp Machines (read: it was copyrighted and not free in any way), they licensed the software to several companies under the conditions that all proprietary changes could not be distributed to anyone else except MIT. AI Lab hackers got all the changes that came from a private company, so they didn't need to leave the lab to work on Lisp Machines. The AI Lab hackers had free will, too. No one forced them to leave, and Stallman's suggestion otherwise is actually really offensive. In fact, if LMI had been the only company, the same people would have left the lab.
Stallman thought that Symbolics's compliance with MIT's licensing agreement was actually an evil plot. His essentially wanted Symbolics to support LMI by giving them proprietary changes. If Symbolics had actually done this, they would have been shut down by MIT for breaking their licensing agreement. The same was true for LMI, which also had to make any changes proprietary. Stallman should have been angry at MIT, not Symbolics.
Stallman completely misunderstood this and his offensive (and quite possibly libelous) slander against honest and ethical Symbolics employees is a very off putting.
Symbolics was a huge company and developed an entire OS, architecture, and many programs for their platform that Stallman did not and could not copy. Stallman mainly copied some features from Zmacs (the text editor). Symbolics made high end machines that sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Nobody would have ditched an expensive Symbolics machine, one of the leading CG platforms of the 80s, because some other platform also an editor that sort of looked like Zmacs. Stallman had pretty much no impact on Symbolics's revenue.