Yeah, I've been wondering about Richard Stallman lately too. His searing experience was seeing the LISP world going commercial and closed... why did he choose to copy Unix instead? Was it just to piggyback on Unix's incumbency? That wasn't so strong at the time anyway. I should re-read Steven Levy's book "Hackers", the answer is probably in there.
I thought the thing that pushed Stallman into open source nirvana was that he couldn't get code to printer drivers to make the printers work in his lab.
