Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler in 1952, Unix was created in 1969, but the Berne convention didn't extend copyright to cover source code until about 1977, and _binaries_ were considered "just a number" and uncopyrightable until the Apple vs Franklin legal decision in 1983. before that there was no common word for "free software" because there was no NON-FREE software. It hadn't been invented yet. There were decades of "freeware" before retail software sales were even legally possible. (People like Bill Gates unhappy with that reality, ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists did contracts with hardware manufacturers to bundle their software with hardware sales, because making copies simply wasn't illegal. Heck, there's an mp3 of a 1980 audio interview with bill gates on http://landley.net/history/mirror/ where he whines about testifying before congress and not being able to change the law.)

By the time Stallman announced he was cloning Unix again, the _first_ clone of Unix (Coherent from the Mark Williams company; new kernel, command line tools, libc, and compiler, took about 3 years to create) had been out for 3 years. Stallman's project wasn't the only Unix clone started in response to Apple vs Franklin, Minix started at the same time and shipped its first release in 1986 (again, ~3 years to create) because professor Andrew Tanenbaum couldn't use the Lyons book to teach his courses anymore, so he wrote his own clone as a teaching tool. Linus Torvalds then wrote Linux under Minix 5 years later, and announced its existence on comp.os.minix, and basically swallowed the Minix development community whole to bootstrap Linux. (Tanenbaum published the source code but didn't take patches upstream because he wanted a teaching tool, not a real-world usable system. Linus _did_ take patches, and the devs had years of backlog they were happy to port over, that's why Linux surged forward so fast.)

Meanwhile BSD started distributing open source code in the late 70's and in 1979 got the contract to replace all the internet routers (see https://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/), and in 1983 they responded to Apple vs Franklin by cleaning the legacy AT&T code out of their Unix fork, but had to survive a lawsuit from AT&T to establish their right to distribute and it took them years to fight that off (https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck...) .

Heck, gcc only took off because Sun VP Ed Zander "unbundled" the compiler from the base OS during the SunOS->Solaris switch and sold it seperately, and the solaris users got mad about that and _refused_ to pay extra for what HAD been part of the base OS before, so they found a freely downloadable m68k compiler (it was 1987) that was _crap_ but almost sort of worked worked, and flooded it with patches to fix everything. (Remember Fabrice Bellard got tinycc to build the Linux kernel in 3 years from a standing start (https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html), and coherent and minix had their own compilers written from scratch in the same amount of time. The only reason Linus didn't use the minix compiler the same way he used the minix filesystem is it targeted 16 bit output like the rest of minix (since the PDP-11 the Lyons book had targeted was 16 bit), by 1990 moore's law had made >640k ram cheap enough the world had gone 32 bit.)

Stallman is great at blowing his own horn, but he is not REMOTELY as important to the history of Linux has he makes himself out to be. In 1998 when Netscape released its source and pointed to The Cathedral and the bazaar as the reason why (which was a 1997 Usenix paper explaining why Linux's "bazaar" development model was superior to the FSF's copyright assignment "cathedral"; yes it was explicitly comparing THOSE TWO development models and said so in the paper), the "anything but microsoft" crowd that Netscape had collected together into Java development poured into Linux instead, famously growing the Linux community 212% in one year. That TRIPLED the size of the community, and the Linux devs had their hands full bringing them up to speed technically and didn't have time to explain history to them.

Stallman saw his chance and started telling the ignorant newbies about the history of the GNU project, which was not and never WAS the history of Linux, but he lied and said it was. Heck, he had a page on his website basically saying "Linux is just a fad, stop talking about it, my vaporware project I announced 15 years ago will be way better" (https://web.archive.org/web/19980126185426/http://www.gnu...).

Nobody ever had to "defend ken thompson's legacy", or defend Linus's or Larry Wall's or anybody else who actually did stuff. But stallman was CONSTANTLY defending "his" legacy because it WASN'T TRUE. It was revisionist history. He wasn't "forgotten", he was _irrelevant_.

He went around the country giving speeches about how great he was, but the founding of the GNU project was a conservative reactionary movement attempting to recapture a glorious past. When copyright law changed out from under the industry he went "no, change bad, I want to roll back the clock to the 1970's by cloning existing software projects". The fact the change _was_ bad (and burned itself out with proprietary software collapsing into a single monopoly and leaving waves of abandonware) doesn't make him a visionary, and every year that's passed since 1983 that "vision" has been a poorer match with modern reality.