Gates didn't write the first versions of Excel and Word, and probably has 0 commits on the source of these projects. Not to disparage the abilities of Gates, b

Gates didn't write the first versions of Excel and Word, and probably has 0 commits on the source of these projects. Not to disparage the abilities of Gates, but there is no useful comparison here to be made. Last talk I saw of Stallman, to a very technical audience, he was asked this same question. If I recall correctly he said that he was working to steer the programming resources towards the most important parts for user freedom (e.g., free operating system for phones), but he did not contributed code directly, leaving this task to more talented younger people. He enjoyed programming a lot, and his coding mojo was mostly spent on emacs macros to automate his daily tasks. (this is just a recollection from a talk heard a few years ago, it may not be exact, but that was the spirit).