Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--0a75a9-Now, if I wanted to actually c/en

Now, if I wanted to actually create a community where there would be people in it, people using this free system, and enjoying the benefits of liberty and cooperation, I had to make a system people would use, a system that they would find easy to switch to, that would not have an obstacle making it fail at the very beginning. Now, making the system upward compatible with Unix actually made all the immediate design decisions, because Unix consists of many pieces, and they communicate through interfaces that are more or less documented. So if you want to be compatible with Unix, you have to replace each piece, one by one, with a compatible piece. So the remaining design decisions are inside one piece, and they could be made later by whoever decides to write that piece. They didn't have to be made at the outset.