-*- text -*-For an order form for all Emacs and FSF distributions deliverable fromthe USA, see http://www.gnu.org/order/order.html. GNU Emacs availability information, October 2000Copyright (C) 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document provided that the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved.GNU Emacs is legally owned by the Free Software Foundation, but weregard the foundation more as its custodian on behalf of the public.In the GNU project, when we speak of "free software", this refers toliberty, not price. Specifically, it refers to the users' freedom tostudy, copy, change and improve the software. Sometimes users paymoney for copies of GNU software, and sometimes they get copies at nocharge. But regardless of how they got the software, or whether itwas modified by anyone else along the way, they have the freedom tocopy and change it--those freedoms are what "free software" means.The precise conditions for copying and modification are stated in thedocument "GNU General Public License," a copy of which is required tobe distributed with every copy of GNU Emacs. It is usually in a filenamed `COPYING' in the same directory as this file. These conditionsare designed to make sure that everyone who has a copy of GNU Emacs(including modified versions) has the freedom to redistribute andchange it.If you do not know anyone to get a copy of GNU Emacs from, you canorder a cd-rom from the Free Software Foundation. We distributeseveral Emacs versions. We also distribute nicely typeset copies ofthe Emacs user manual, Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, the Emacsreference card, etc. See http://www.gnu.org/order/order.html.If you have Internet access, you can copy the latest Emacsdistribution from hosts, such as ftp.gnu.org. There are several waysto do this; see http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html for moreinformation.Emacs has been run on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and on manyUnix systems, on a variety of types of cpu, as well as on MSDOS,Windows and MacOS. It also formerly worked on VMS and on Apollocomputers, though with some deficiencies that reflect problems inthese operating systems. See the file `MACHINES' in this directory(see above) for a full list of machines that GNU Emacs has been testedon, with machine-specific installation notes and warnings.Note that there is significant variation between Unix systemssupposedly running the same version of Unix; it is possible that whatworks in GNU Emacs for me does not work on your system due to such anincompatibility. Since I must avoid reading Unix source code, Icannot even guess what such problems may exist.GNU Emacs is distributed with no warranty (see the General PublicLicense for full details, in the file `COPYING' in this directory (seeabove)), and neither I nor the Free Software Foundation promises anykind of support or assistance to users. The foundation keeps a listof people who are willing to offer support and assistance for hire.See http://www.gnu.org/help/gethelp.html.However, we plan to continue to improve GNU Emacs and keep itreliable, so please send me any complaints and suggestions you have.I will probably fix anything that I consider a malfunction. I maymake improvements that are suggested, but I may choose not to.If you are on the Internet, report bugs to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Youcan use the Emacs command M-x report-bug RET to mail a bug report.Please read the Bugs section of the Emacs manual before reportingbugs.General questions about the GNU Project can be asked of gnu@gnu.org.If you are a computer manufacturer, I encourage you to ship a copy ofGNU Emacs with every computer you deliver. The same copyingpermission terms apply to computer manufacturers as to everyone else.You should consider making a donation to help support the GNU project;if you estimate what it would cost to distribute some commercialproduct and divide it by five, that is a good amount.If you like GNU Emacs, please express your satisfaction with adonation: send me or the Foundation what you feel Emacs has been worthto you. If you are glad that I developed GNU Emacs and distribute itas free software, rather than following the obstructive and antisocialpractices typical of software developers, reward me. If you wouldlike the Foundation to develop more free software, contribute.Your donations will help to support the development of additional GNUsoftware. GNU/Linux systems (variants of GNU, based on the kernelLinux) have millions of users, but there is still much to be done.For more information on GNU, see the file `GNU' in this directory (seeabove). Richard M Stallman Chief GNUisance, President of the Free Software Foundation