Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman (born March 16, 1953) is the founder of the free software movement, the GNU project, and the Free Software Foundation. He created GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. He is one of the main authors of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL), the most used free software license, which pioneered the concept of the copyleft.
Since the mid-1990s, he has spent most of his time as a political campaigner, talking about free software and campaigning against proprietary software, software idea patents and expansions of copyright law. The time that he still spends on programming is spent on GNU Emacs. He is currently supported by various fellowships and maintains a modest standard of living.
Harvard University and MIT
As a first-year student at Harvard University in fall 1970, Stallman was known for his strong performance in Math 55. He was happy, "For the first time in my life, I felt I had found a home at Harvard."
In 1971, near the end of his first year at Harvard, he became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, RMS, which he used in his computer accounts. Stallman received a bachelor's degree in physics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1974. He considered staying on at Harvard, but instead decided to enroll as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He pursued a doctorate in physics for one year, but left the program to focus on his programming at the MIT AI Laboratory.
While working (starting in 1975) as a research assistant at MIT under Gerry Sussman, Stallman published a paper (with Sussman) in 1977 on an AI truth maintenance system, called dependency-directed backtracking. The paper was an early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems.
As a hacker in MIT's AI laboratory, Stallman worked on software projects like TECO and Emacs for the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), as well as the Lisp machine operating system (the CONS of 1974–1976 and the CADR of 1977–1979—this latter unit was commercialized by Symbolics and Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI) starting around 1980).
Richard Stallman Media
Stallman giving a speech on "Free Software and Your Freedom" at the biennale du design of Saint-Étienne (2008)
Stallman using his Lemote machine at Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai
Stallman at Swatantra 2014, a conference organized by ICFOSS in Kerala, India
Stallman, in costume as St. IGNUcius, wearing a halo consisting of the platter of an old hard disk drive (Monastir, Tunisia, 2012)
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Other websites
- Stallman.org – Richard Stallman's personal homepage
- Richard Stallman's blog
- Richard Works by Richard Stallman at Project Gutenberg