Creating and advocating for a legal framework elevates this to a different level. There is a difference between passing floppy discs to your buddies and software that whole industries are based on. It needs a solid legal foundation. And a philosophocal framework too, i it's supposed to survive.

And that's what we should credit rms for.

You are correct if you're only talking about software created by _yourself_. However, most of the software I got on 9-track tapes were collective works, with the usual case being that the copyright owner was the employer of the people who actually wrote the software.