The one really clever thing that Stallman did; is the bit in the license where nobody else can steal the stuff without making it open source too. That's his genius. Possibly his only genius; but it acts to protect Linux and other GPLd software from being embraced and extended by the likes of Microsoft. AFAIK no other open source license before that did that; and his extreme public position made lots of people know about it and adopt it, kinda like "Who is this whacko? Hey cool license!"Stallman, despite some of his propaganda, had very little to do with Linux in the final analysis. Had the GPL not existed, Linux would probably have appeared under one of the other open-source license variants.
The GPL makes Linux more or less unstoppable; but you're right, apart from helping with the initial toolset, compilers linkers and so forth, he had very little to do with Linux.
Anyway, this is all off-topic; unless you intend to print plans for ERPS hardware/software under the GPL or near equivalent.
Henry Spencer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
