RMS

I feel like everyone's just too polite to say that Richard Stallman's just another programmer.  What has he actually done?  He's tried to attach himself to the coattails of Linux with his infamous "interjection," but his own Unix effort took 30 years and is mostly unused.  What else?  Emacs?  Does the author of Notepad++ get worldwide recognition for his efforts?

I'm not saying the man's useless, just that there are people who do more for less recognition.  Enough zealotry already.

When Symbolics stopped sending over its source-code changes, Stallman responded by holing up in his MIT offices and rewriting each new software feature and tool from scratch. Frustrating as it may have been, it guaranteed that future Lisp Machine users had unfettered access to the same features as Symbolics users.
It also guaranteed Stallman's legendary status within the hacker community. Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics programmers-a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself-still stands has one of the major human accomplishments of the Information Age, or of any age for that matter. Dubbing it a "master hack" and Stallman himself a "virtual John Henry of computer code," author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging respect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman's output during this period:
"I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, 'But wait a minute-Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!'"