[Discuss] Stallman stubborn

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:

>
> I can't parse LPF, but I think BSD would have gotten there,
> eventually... even without rms and the FSF.  Or someone else would
> have done it...  Like Linus Torvalds.

I'm not certain, but I think that 386BSD and Linux would have never
happened without the GCC compiler suite.   I don't recall any other
freely distributable C compilers being available when they were first
being developed.   Even today the Linux kernel developers typically
use GCC rather then the main free competitor (LLVM/Clang).   FreeBSD,
for example, used GCC by default until version 10 (released in 2014!).
In addition, the community 386 port of Minix used GCC  which is what
Linus used for his initial Linux development environment.  So as I see
it the entire landscape of widely used free operating systems was
dependent on GCC for which RMS was the major developer in the early
days.   RMS may have not been directly involved in a widely used OS
kernel, but he was very involved in making sure the most important
toolset required to develop one was available.

Bill Bogstad