Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--275a86-I should finish the historical/en

I should finish the historical story. You see, we set out in 1984 not just to write some free software but to do something much more coherent: to develop an operating system that was entirely free software. So that meant we had to write piece after piece after piece. Of course, we were always looking for shortcuts. The job was so big that people said we'd never be able to finish. And, I thought that there was at least a chance that we'd finish it but, obviously, it's worth looking for shortcuts. So we kept looking around. Is there any program that somebody else has written that we could manage to adapt, to plug into here, and that way we won't have to write it from scratch? For instance, the X Window system. It's true it wasn't copylefted, but it was free software, so we could use it.