[okmjuhb]

I wonder how many Hacker Newsers really remember what it was like back before the GPL and the FSF. The availability of a high-quality open source unix system is pretty much the defining quality of modern computing, and it took us out of the dark ages of a half dozen mutually incompatible proprietary OSs, compilers, and commandline utility packages (sometimes broken - with fixes impossible).

Stallman's contribution is much greater than that of cheerleader or discussion framer - the ecosystem that exists in large part because of him is, I suspect, tremendously important in the day to day lives of many of the people reading this.

[evgen]

I wasn't really online _before_ GNU/FSF, but I was around early enough to remember ordering GCC on 9-track magtape from the FSF to help support them back in the day. I was also pulling down great kit from mit (like X), project athena (kerberos, etc), and free code and utilities from hackers around the world (many that were later "embraced and extended" by GNU/FSF.) Maybe working in a university computing center gave me a distorted view of the world at the time, but I am reasonably certain that we would have gotten along just fine without RMS. Some things might have taken longer to appear or converge on a standard, but other things might also have moved a lot faster if the BSD license was the dominant format within the open source movement.

[protomyth]

Giving the GPL sole credit is a little bit of a stretch, BSD / MIT / Apache licensed projects have made major contributions to the current ecosystem.