6 Jan
2019
6 Jan
'19
8:18 a.m.
On Sat, Jan 5, 2019, 8:50 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson(a)eschatologist.net wrote:
On Jan 5, 2019, at 9:01 AM, A. P. Garcia
<a.phillip.garcia(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On Sat, Jan 5, 2019, 10:39 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com wrote:
A google search turned up a speech by rms that I hadnˋt previously seen, as
well as Weinrebˋs rebuttal:
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html
http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_rms.html
+1. RMS always talked big but the real work was
done by other people.
GCC was Tiemann at Sun and then at Cygnus, groff was James Clark,
etc. I think RMS hacked on emacs but not much else.
I'm going to refrain from either praising or disparaging the man. I think
the book Hackers by Steven Levy does a good job of describing him and how
the idea for the GNU project came about.
Dan Weinreb, who was in charge of Symbolics at the time, strongly disputed
the RMS (and “Hackers”) story of GNU’s inspiration from what Symbolics “did
to” the AI Lab.
By Weinreb’s account, Symbolics hired relatively few people away from the
Lab, and RMS wasn’t simply rewriting Symbolics’ enhancements (which were
shared with the Lab, and Symbolics’ customers of course) for the MIT and
LMI environments, he was actually caught copying their code directly.