gcc was an important piece of work that Stallman started. The rest of the GNU stuff was a bunch of knock-off code because the original code was bound up in lawsuits (just like the kernel) or later replicated because of licensing purity of essence concerns. Writing a second verson of tar, cpio, cron, etc. hardly counts as a great piece of innovation, and Stallman is kind of a git for acting like it is. The thing about Linux is that Torvalds just went ahead and wrote it, rather than wanking about it for years and years like Stallman did.
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gcc was an important piece of work that Stallman started. The rest of the GNU stuff was a bunch of knock-off code because the original code was bound up in lawsuits (just like the kernel) or later replicated because of licensing purity of essence concerns. Writing a second verson of tar, cpio, cron, etc. hardly counts as a great piece of innovation, and Stallman is kind of a git for acting like it is. The thing about Linux is that Torvalds just went ahead and wrote it, rather than wanking about it for years and years like Stallman did.