XEmacs is a descendant of Emacs, most of which was written in the mid-1970s by Richard Stallman , a gifted hacker who has spent most of the past two decades working as a volunteer in the halls of the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Stallman began coding, proprietary software hardly existed. In those long-ago days programmers freely passed their code around for colleagues to use, critique, and improve. Stallman thought of this as eminently sensible. To many hackers, the rise of the commercial software industry came as an unpleasant surprise.
Companies sell software in the form of zeros and ones on computer disks.
After all, people can create altered versions of copyrighted stories simply by typing them. The reason is that software isn't like other copyrighted works. Programmers write it in the form of cryptic instructions that somewhat resemble mathematical equations. Although source code is incomprehensible to the hoi polloi, skilled programmers can read it almost as if it were ordinary prose. But even the digital elite cannot read machine language.