- GCC was a necessary prerequisite to starting in on a kernel. What good would a free OS have been if it wasn't self-hosting on free software? - Emacs was a p

- GCC was a necessary prerequisite to starting in on a kernel. What good would a free OS have been if it wasn't self-hosting on free software? - Emacs was a politically important project because there had been a serious free-software kerfuffle among emacs-like editors. The most popular such editor for unix, Gosling emacs, had recently gone from open source to closed source without warning.