Difference between revisions of "Richard Stallman"
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'''Richard Stallman''' (born March 16, 1953) is a software freedom activist and software developer. In 1983 he launched the Free Software Movement, as well as his plans to develop the GNU Operating System, a completely free Unix-like operating system. Two years later, in October of 1985, he started the Free Software Foundation, of which he is still president and volunteer. | '''Richard Stallman''' (born March 16, 1953) is a software freedom activist and software developer. In 1983 he launched the Free Software Movement, as well as his plans to develop the GNU Operating System, a completely free Unix-like operating system. Two years later, in October of 1985, he started the Free Software Foundation, of which he is still president and volunteer. | ||
Revision as of 19:27, 11 October 2012
Richard Stallman (born March 16, 1953) is a software freedom activist and software developer. In 1983 he launched the Free Software Movement, as well as his plans to develop the GNU Operating System, a completely free Unix-like operating system. Two years later, in October of 1985, he started the Free Software Foundation, of which he is still president and volunteer.
Stallman authored the GNU General Public License, which implements copyleft, a concept he coined to protect the modification and redistribution rights of free software. Stallman is responsible for the core development of a number of widely used software components of the GNU system, including the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), and GNU Emacs.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Richard Stallman was born March 16, 1953 to Daniel Stallman and Alice Lippman in New York City. He attended Harvard beginning in 1970 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1974. He began working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a programmer for the Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. From September 1974 to June 1975 he was a graduate student in physics at MIT. During this time, Stallman became a dedicated member of the hacker community, where he became known as his initials "rms," the name he used for his computer accounts.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the hacker culture at MIT shifted as developers wanted to prevent their software from being used by competitors. During these years many manufacturers stopped distributing source code and enacted protective software licenses to limit copying and redistribution.
The GNU Project
GNU...
