The GNU Emacs Manual, first published in 1987 and continuously updated across more than twenty editions, is stallman's primary technical documentation project and an artifact that blurs the line between software reference manual and political statement. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License with invariant sections, the manual is both a comprehensive guide to GNU Emacs and an assertion that software documentation, like software itself, must be free.
stallman wrote the original GNU Emacs editor beginning in 1984 as the first major component of the gnu-project. Emacs has deep roots in the mit-ai-lab-hacker-culture-1971-1984 era: stallman created the first Emacs by packaging a set of macros for the TECO editor at MIT, and gerald-sussman and guy-steele were among the early contributors. The GNU version was a complete rewrite in C and Emacs Lisp, designed to be the extensible, programmable editor of the free software world.
The manual is significant for several reasons beyond its technical content. First, it demonstrates stallman's conviction that high-quality documentation is as important as high-quality code — a position grounded in his experience at MIT, where the best tools came with complete explanations. Second, the manual's invariant sections, which the fdl permits, include philosophical statements about free software, making the manual a vehicle for stallman's ideas about the four-freedoms and the importance of user control.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the manual's existence under a free documentation license was a direct challenge to the then-common practice of releasing free software with non-free documentation. O'Reilly Associates and other publishers had a business model of writing proprietary manuals for free software; stallman's position was that this was as problematic as proprietary software itself. The fdl and the GNU Emacs Manual were designed to model an alternative.
The manual's controversy in the Debian community — where the fdl's invariant sections clause caused classification as non-free — illustrates the tension between stallman's commitment to preserving his philosophical statements verbatim and the broader community's preference for maximally permissive documentation licenses. stallman regarded this as a misunderstanding of the purpose of invariant sections; Debian's project policy team regarded it as a genuine freedom restriction.
GNU Emacs itself is also the context of the gnu-emacs-first-release event and remains the editor of choice for many stallman devotees. The event was a milestone in demonstrating that the gnu-project could produce complete, high-quality tools.