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Symbolics felt that they no longer had sufficient control over their product.

At that point, Symbolics began using their own copy of the software, located on their company servers — while Stallman says that Symbolics did that to prevent its Lisp improvements from flowing to Lisp Machines, Inc. From that base, Symbolics made extensive improvements to every part of the software, and continued to deliver almost all the source code to their customers ( including MIT ).

However, the policy prohibited MIT staff from distributing the Symbolics version of the software to others.

With the end of open collaboration came the end of the MIT hacker community.

As a reaction to this, Stallman initiated the GNU project to make a new community.

Eventually, Copyleft and the GNU General Public License would ensure that a hacker's software could remain free software.

In this way Symbolics played a key, albeit adversarial, role in instigating the free software movement.