Is he that great at writing free software? There are certainly a lot of important, great, useful, projects coming out of GNU, but how much of the code has he personally had a hand in writing?
I'm honestly asking because I'm not sure. I don't know if he wrote all of it himself, or none of it.
I don't think Stallman actually wrote a lot of software in recent years (decades?). As far as writing "free" software, he literally stole other people's code for use in Emacs [0].
That is by far the worst representation of what happened that I have ever read:
MIT AI lab started it
Then Steele and Stallman wrote the first prod Emacs in 1976.
Then Gosling wrote his Emacs in 1981.
He freely distributed his version. (as was Emacs 1976).
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Emacs development began during the 1970s at the MIT AI Lab,
Steele and Stallman's finished implementation included facilities for extending and documenting the new macro set. The resulting system was called EMACS,
The first operational EMACS system existed in late 1976.
James Gosling, wrote Gosling Emacs in 1981.
The initial version was freely distributed for free.
Since Gosling had permitted its unrestricted redistribution, Richard Stallman used some Gosling Emacs code in the initial version of GNU Emacs. Among other things, he rewrote part of the Gosling code headed by the skull-and-crossbones comment and made it "...shorter, faster, clearer and more flexible."
In 1983 UniPress began selling Gosling Emacs on Unix for $395 and on VMS for $2,500, marketing it as "EMACSโmulti-window text editor (Gosling version)".
Controversially, Unipress asked Stallman to stop distributing his version of Emacs for Unix
UniPress never took legal action against Stallman or his nascent Free Software Foundation,[citation needed] believing "hobbyists and academics could never produce an Emacs that could compete" with their product.[citation needed] All Gosling Emacs code was removed from GNU Emacs by version 16.56 (July 1985)
