Stallman: If You Want Freedom Don’t Follow Linus Torvalds

“On Feb. 3, 1976, Bill Gates wrote his famous ‘open letter to hobbyists’ where he stated that software should be paid [for] just like hardware. Did you read that manifesto at the time? What was your impression back then?

“Stallman: I never heard of it at the time. I was not a hobbyist, I was a system developer employed at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. I had little interest in 16-bit microcomputers, because the lab’s PDP-10, with a memory equivalent to 2.5 megabytes, was much more fun. Pascal is both weak and inelegant compared with Lisp, our high-level language, and for things that had to be fast, assembler language was more flexible…”
Read more at PC World