Z:gnu-www-ja-google-engineering-talk--40cc53-Now, people were saying the jo/en

Now, people were saying the job was so big, we'd never finish it. Well, I thought we would eventually get a free operating system but I agreed the job was big; we had to look for shortcuts. So, for instance, I always wanted to have windowing facilities in GNU. I had written a couple of window systems at the AI LAB before even starting GNU, so of course I wanted that in the system. But we never developed a GNU window system because someone else developed X first. I looked at it and I said, "well, it's not copylefted, but it is free, it's popular, it's powerful, so let's just use it." And so we saved one big chunk of work. So we took it, X, and we put it into the GNU system and we started making other pieces of GNU work with X. Because the goal was to have a free operating system, not to have a free operating system every piece of which had been written purposely by us just for that.