[IdeaHamster]

I'm fairly sure the parent's reference to Bell is with respect to details that have recently come to light that Bell may have "stolen" all or most of the technology behind the first phone. That is, Bell's importance has less to do with his ability to create the technology and more to do with packaging and popularizing it.

[IgorPartola]

I was not aware of that. Nonetheless, it seemed to me that the parent post implied that if RMS and GNU didn't come to be, then someone else would have come up and done the same thing, and thus what they did is somewhat less of an achievement. My post was mostly in disagreement with that idea.