[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.