I interpreted this bit as intentionally reductive for the sake of humor. And I thought it was funny!

okay after a reading it a few times I can see how it could be considered tongue in cheek I'll give it that

As with most legends, it left out the details but got the crux of the situation right.

The crux of the situation was that RMS started GNU because he realized that not having access to the printer's source code put whoever had access to it in a position of power over his use of the printer and the implications that has when extended to other aspects where software is concerned and will be concerned with as computer use increases.

This was not mentioned at all in the blog post.

He doesn't mention the power dynamic in the story (https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...).

You can infer it mattered, but you can also infer he was pissed he couldn't make the machine do what he wanted. These are both valid interpretations if the same story... Which is the "crux" is up to the teller.

The entire point of Free Software is about users being in control of their programs, so of course it is about the power dynamic. But of course even if it was about him pissed - and he was pissed, which is something he did mention - it was because he was denied that control.

There isn't really any other interpretation than that.

Also the story you linked at is not RMS' story, but a different and more recent story which is also about a printer that sounds similar to RMS'. The RMS story is linked in the page you gave, though it is a transcript and kinda big. Here is the relevant bits:

> And then I heard that somebody at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy of that software. So I was visiting there later, so I went to his office and I said, "Hi, I'm from MIT. Could I have a copy of the printer source code?" And he said "No, I promised not to give you a copy." [Laughter] I was stunned. I was so -- I was angry, and I had no idea how I could do justice to it. All I could think of was to turn around on my heel and walk out of his room. Maybe I slammed the door. [Laughter] And I thought about it later on, because I realized that I was seeing not just an isolated jerk, but a social phenomenon that was important and affected a lot of people.

Emphasis on the last bit: "And I thought about it later on, because I realized that I was seeing not just an isolated jerk, but a social phenomenon that was important and affected a lot of people."

And after all he made the Free Software Foundation, not Working Printers Foundation.

That's a good story about being pissed you can't make the software do what you want.

That's not what the story is about though.

did it get the crux right? To me this reads like Stallman got mad a company said no to him and because of that decided to rewrite UNIX because idk

That happens sometimes. Knuth got mad there wasn't any good typesetting software for his book and wrote TeX.

Stallman wanted an ecosystem he could control. Did it work? Sort of.

This article was not about retelling the GNU story. Think of that sentence as a cultural reference, not an explanatory history.