On Jan 5, 2019, at 9:01 AM, A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Jan 5, 2019, 10:39 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com wrote:

+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.