I was also at Sun in '91. Michael Tiemann worked there for a while, on gcc.
Prior to my time at Sun, I'd made contributions to gcc, gdb, gas and emacs (all in support of the Convex architecture) before my time at Sun. (My former boss from Convex was the president of BSDi, too. Most of the engineers from Prisma, his company between Convex and BSDi, came to Sun when Prisma folded, becoming the early version of Sun's RMTC.)
You do some disservice to rms here. Easy enough to understand (rms is easy to dislike).
By 91, GNU had a compiler, and emacs, both of which Linus used to develop his kernel.
Not that this is particularly relevant to anything, but AFAIK even back then Linus was using MicroEMACS, not gnu emacs.
Having said that, I agree that people are generally discounting rms' immense contributions* a bit too easily here.
* (both technical contributions and in terms of just the entire culture of open source, which he really helped shape in a very significant way, and I say that as someone who mostly dislikes the GPL and prefers MIT/BSD style licenses)
I was a student at the time, but it seemed like GCC was like the Linux of its day, causing a lot of upheavals in the compiler market. GCC code was so fast compared to what was out there.
My impression, as someone who had a used Sun 3/50 in the early 90s, who later used Linux a lot, and who used various Unix workstations (IBM, Sun, Next, SGI, HP) in college:
For the bulk of Unix user/developers, the big thing was that GCC reintroduced the idea that you should be able to get free dev tools for your Unix OS, during a time when some vendors had decided that you should pay more to get the dev tools in addition to the base OS.
I agree, though it's notable that open source is quite distinct from free software. I recall the beginning of the open source movement well. I would argue that the GPL is Stallman's greatest contribution to programming.
I was also at Sun in '91. Michael Tiemann worked there for a while, on gcc.
Prior to my time at Sun, I'd made contributions to gcc, gdb, gas and emacs (all in support of the Convex architecture) before my time at Sun. (My former boss from Convex was the president of BSDi, too. Most of the engineers from Prisma, his company between Convex and BSDi, came to Sun when Prisma folded, becoming the early version of Sun's RMTC.)
You do some disservice to rms here. Easy enough to understand (rms is easy to dislike).
By 91, GNU had a compiler, and emacs, both of which Linus used to develop his kernel.