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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.

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.

Early Life and Education

Richard Matthew 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

Stallman announced his plans for the GNU operating system in September 1983. GNU is a recursive acronym which stands for "GNU's Not Unix," as the operating system is both Unix-like and Unix-compatible. In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Maifesto, which detailed his plans and motivation for GNU. The central philosophy of GNU is outlined in Four Essential Freedoms^[1] (typically numbered programmatically 0-3) as follows:

1. Freedom to run the program
2. Freedom to study and change the program in source code form
3. Freedom to redistribute exact copies
4. Freedom to distribute modified versions

In 1991, Linus Torvalds released the Linux Kernel, an operating system kernel based on the GNU system. Since then, the Linux operating system is now among the most widely used, especially among developers. The terminology used when referring to Linux is controversial, as Stallman feels that the name Linux alone does not offer sufficient credit to its basis in GNU. Stallman has repeatedly asked that it be referred to as GNU/Linux (or more recently GNU+Linux) because it conveys a more accurate representation of "the system's origin, history, and purpose."^[2]

Activism

Stallman frequently gives speeches on the free software movement and related topics. He is also a well-published essayist and writer on the same topics (see publications).

Honors and Awards

• 1986: Honorary lifetime membership of the Chalmers University of Technology Computer Society^[3]

Publications

Papers in Technical and Academic Journals

Manuals

External Links

Richard Stallman's personal website

GNU.org

The Free Software Foundation

References

1. ↑ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html Philosophy of the GNU Project
2. ↑ http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html What's In A Name?
3. ↑ [1] "Talk by Richard rms Stallman". Chalmers University of Technology.

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