> So 5 years after he started with an empty repo and some political ramblings? Or around 4 years after the first public GNU Emacs release, 4 years after the fi

> So 5 years after he started with an empty repo and some political ramblings? Or around 4 years after the first public GNU Emacs release, 4 years after the first public GNU Bison release, 3 years after the first public GDB release, and 2 years after the first public GCC release. > GNU did not have a working system until Linus released Linux in 1992. They had pieces and components which were worthless on their own. Correct, just like how the initial public BSD release was just the networking stack (worthless on its own). > There is a lot of deliberate ignorance of public domain code being posted on BBSes at the time. Not sure where you got that from. Nobody claims that Stallman was the first one to come up with publicly releasing source code. I will say that a lot of the "public domain" software from back then lacks the uniformity you see from later movements like free software or open source. Some of it isn't even public domain, and has a license like "this is copyright me, any modified copies must have my copyright statement preserved, this software may not be used for commercial purposes".