On Sat, Jan 5, 2019, 8:50 PM Chris Hanson <cmhanson@eschatologist.net wrote:

> 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.
>

A google search turned up a speech by rms that I hadnˋt previously seen, as
well as Weinrebˋs rebuttal:

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html

http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_rms.html