Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often known by his initials, rms, is a software freedom activist and computer programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute and modify that software - wikipedia

Software that ensures these freedoms is termed Free Software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License.

Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to create a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. With this, he also launched the free software movement. He has been the GNU project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including, among others, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger and the GNU Emacs text editor. In October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify and distribute free software, and is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license.

In 1989 he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management, and other legal and technical systems which he sees as taking away users' freedoms, including software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats and binary executables without source code.

As of 2014, he has received fifteen honorary doctorates and professorships (see Honors and awards).

Stallman argues that the term "intellectual property" is designed to confuse people, and is used to prevent intelligent discussion on the specifics of copyright, patent, trademark, and other laws by lumping together areas of law that are more dissimilar, than similar.<ref name="torino"/> He also argues that by referring to these laws as property laws, the term biases the discussion when thinking about how to treat these issues.

Stallman professes admiration for Julian Assange and Edward Snowden - livemint.com and rt.com

He advocates for Snowden in his email signature, which can be found in several mailing lists, after Snowden leaked the PRISM scandal in 2013:

Stallman was born to Alice Lippman, a school teacher, and Daniel Stallman, a printing press broker, in 1953 in New York City. He was interested in computers at a young age; when Stallman was a pre-teen at a summer camp, he read manuals for the IBM 7094 (IBM 7090#IBM 7094).Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-Certified Genius From 1967 to 1969, Stallman attended a Columbia University Saturday program for high school students.<ref name="mgro"/> Stallman was also a volunteer laboratory assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was interested in mathematics and physics, his teaching professor at Rockefeller thought he showed promise as a biologist.<ref name="freeasinfreedom-chap3"/>

His first experience with actual computers was at the IBM New York Scientific Center when he was in high school. He was hired for the summer in 1970, following his senior year of high school, to write a numerical analysis program in Fortran.<ref name="mgro" /> He completed the task after a couple of weeks ("I swore that I would never use FORTRAN again because I despised it as a language compared with other languages") and spent the rest of the summer writing a text editor in APL (APL (programming language))<ref name="Berättar"/> and a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM System/360.<ref name="emac6"/>

As a first-year student at Harvard University in fall 1970, Stallman was known for his strong performance in Math 55.<ref name="freeasinfreedom-chap4"/> He was happy: "For the first time in my life, I felt I had found a home at Harvard."<ref name="mgro"/>

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 (hacker (programmer subculture)) community, where he was usually known by his initials, ''RMS'' (which was the name of his computer accounts).<ref name="initials" />[ ] Stallman graduated from Harvard ''magna cum laude (wikt:magna cum laude)'' earning a bachelor's degree in Physics in 1974.Serious Bio

Stallman considered staying on at Harvard, but instead he decided to enroll as a graduate student at MIT. He ended his pursuit of a doctorate in physics after one year, in order to focus on his programming at the MIT AI Laboratory.<ref name="mgro"/>[ Free as in freedom : Richard Stallman's crusade for free software]

While working (starting in 1975) as a research assistant at MIT under Gerry Sussman (Gerald Jay Sussman),<ref name="emac6"/> Stallman published a paper (with Sussman) in 1977 on an AI truth maintenance system, called ''dependency-directed backtracking''.<ref name="AI9"/> This paper was an early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems. As of 2009<sup class="plainlinks noprint asof-tag update" style="display:none;">[//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Stallman&action=edit &#91;update&#93;]</sup><nowiki/>Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2009Category:All articles containing potentially dated statements, the technique Stallman and Sussman introduced is still the most general and powerful form of intelligent backtracking.<ref name="russell"/> The technique of constraint recording (constraint learning), wherein partial results of a search are recorded for later reuse, was also introduced in this paper.<ref name="russell" />

As a hacker in MIT's AI laboratory, Stallman worked on software projects such as TECO (TECO (text editor)), Emacs for ITS (Incompatible Timesharing System), and the Lisp machine operating system (the CONS of 1974–1976 and the CADR of 1977–1979—this latter unit was commercialized by Symbolics and LMI (Lisp Machines, Inc.) starting around 1980).<ref name="The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih"/> He would become an ardent critic of restricted computer access in the lab, which at that time was funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). When MIT's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Laboratory for Computer Science (Project MAC) (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password, with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems. Around 20% of the users followed his advice at the time, although passwords ultimately prevailed. Stallman boasted of the success of his campaign for many years afterward.<ref name="Levy"/>

In February 1984, Stallman quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU project, which he had announced in September 1983.

Stallman has written many essays on software freedom, and has been an outspoken political campaigner for the free software movement since the early 1990s.<ref name="The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih"/> The speeches he has regularly given are titled ''The GNU Project and the Free Software Movement'',<ref name="zagreb"/> ''The Dangers of Software Patents'',<ref name="IFSO"/> and ''Copyright and Community in the Age of Computer Networks''.<ref name="copyright-and-globalization"/> In 2006 and 2007, during the eighteen month public consultation for the drafting of version 3 of the GNU General Public License, he added a fourth topic explaining the proposed changes.<ref name="gpl3"/>

Linus Torvalds has criticized Stallman for what he considers "black-and-white thinking."<ref name="black-and-white" />

Stallman's staunch advocacy for free software inspired the creation of the Virtual Richard M. Stallman (vrms), software that analyzes the packages currently installed on a Debian GNU/Linux system, and reports those that are from the non-free tree.<ref name="vrms"/> Stallman disagrees with parts of Debian's definition of free software.<ref name="debbug"/>

In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free online encyclopedia through the means of inviting the public to contribute articles.<ref name="free-encyclopedia"/> The resulting GNUPedia was eventually retired in favour of the emerging Wikipedia, which had similar aims and was enjoying greater success.<ref name="encyclopedia"/>

Stallman is a world traveler and has visited at least 65 countries, mostly to speak about free software and the GNU project.<ref name="shaggygod"/> According to Stallman, the free software movement has much in common with that of Mahatma Gandhi.<ref name="fsfindia"/>

In Venezuela, Stallman has delivered public speeches and promoted the adoption of free software in the state's oil company (PDVSA), in municipal government, and in the nation's military. In meetings with Hugo Chávez and in public speeches, Stallman criticised some policies on television broadcasting, free speech rights, and privacy.<ref name="chavez"/><ref name="chavezthreat"/> Stallman was on the Advisory Council of Latin American television station teleSUR from its launch<ref name="chaveztv"/> but resigned in February 2011, criticizing pro-Gaddafi propaganda during the Arab Spring.<ref name="politics-feb"/>

In August 2006, at his meetings with the government of the Indian State of Kerala, he persuaded officials to discard proprietary software, such as Microsoft's, at state-run schools. This has resulted in a landmark decision to switch all school computers in 12,500 high schools from Windows (Microsoft Windows) to a free software operating system.<ref name="kerala"/>

After personal meetings, Stallman obtained positive statements about the free software movement from the then-president of India, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam,<ref name="president-india"/> French 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal,<ref name="stallman-royal"/> and the president of Ecuador Rafael Correa.<ref name="latin-america"/>

On November 30, 2012, Stallman gave the opening lecture at the Goiano Free Software Forum in Brazil, talking about successful cases of switching to free software in government, business and at universities.9º Fórum Goiano de Software Livre &#124; Richard Stallman estará lá - Diolinux - Notícias, Tutoriais e Games para Linux

Stallman has participated in protests about software patents,<ref name="kpoe"/> DRM (Digital Rights Management),<ref name="mpaa"/><ref name="protest-france"/> and proprietary software.

Protesting against proprietary software in April 2006, Stallman held a "Don't buy from ATI (ATI Technologies), enemy of your freedom" placard at a speech by an ATI representative in the building where Stallman worked, resulting in the police being called.<ref name="protest-ati"/> ATI has since merged with AMD Corporation and has taken steps to make their hardware documentation available for use by the free software community.<ref name="amd-open"/>

In response to Apple (Apple Inc)'s Macintosh (Apple Macintosh) look and feel lawsuits against Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard in 1988, Stallman called for a boycott of Apple products on the grounds that a successful look-and-feel lawsuit would "put an end to free software that could substitute for commercial software".GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1 no. 5 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation The boycott was lifted in 1995, which meant the FSF started to accept patches (patch (computing)) to GNU software for Apple operating systems.GNU's Bulletin, vol. 1 no. 18 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

Stallman has characterized Steve Jobs as having a "malign influence" on computing because of Jobs' leadership in guiding Apple to produce closed platforms.<ref name="Clarke"/><ref name="Jobs"/> In 1993, while Jobs was at NeXT, Jobs asked Stallman if he could distribute a modified GCC in two parts, one part under GPL and the other part, an Objective-C preprocessor under a proprietary license. Stallman initially thought this would be legal, but since he also thought it would be "very undesirable for free software", he asked a lawyer for advice. The response he got was that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them, and a judge would ask whether it was "really" one program, rather than how the parts were labeled. Therefore, Stallman sent a message back to Jobs which said they believed Jobs' plan was not allowed by the GPL, which resulted in NeXT releasing the Objective-C front end under GPL.I hate to have to play this role with a fellow hacker, but...

Commenting on Jobs' death, he said

Stallman's remark stirred up accusations of being in bad taste, while Eric S. Raymond, author of ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar'', observed that Stallman's statement was not personal, but was simply criticizing walled gardens (Walled garden (technology)).<ref name="Clarke" />

For a period of time, Stallman used a notebook from the One Laptop per Child program. Stallman's computer is a refurbished ThinkPad X60 (ThinkPad X Series#X60 and X60s) with Libreboot, a free BIOS replacement, and the GNU/Linux distribution Trisquel.<ref name="stallman-computing"/> Before the ThinkPad, Stallman used the Lemote Yeeloong netbook (using the same company's Loongson processor) which he chose because, like the X60, it could run with free software at the BIOS level, stating "freedom is my priority. I've campaigned for freedom since 1983, and I am not going to surrender that freedom for the sake of a more convenient computer."<ref name="usesthis" /> Stallman's Lemote was stolen from him in 2012 while in Argentina.<ref name="argentina" /> Before Trisquel, Stallman has used the gNewSense operating system.An interview with Richard Stallman [ ]

Until 1998, his office at MIT's AI Lab (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) was also his residence.<ref name="iw-glimpse"/> He was registered to vote from there. Currently he has a separate residence in Cambridge not far from MIT.<ref name="lifestyle"/> His position as a research affiliate at MIT is unpaid.<ref name="mit-takeda-2001-10-17"/>

In a footnote to an article he wrote in 1999, he says "As an atheist (Atheism), I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said."<ref name="OpenSources"/> Stallman often wears a button that reads ''"Impeach God"''.<ref name="freeasinfreedom-chap4"/><ref name="Proulx"/> When asked if he was Jewish, Stallman said he was "an atheist but of Jewish ancestry".<ref name="stallman-jewish-source-1"/>

Stallman chooses not to celebrate Christmas, instead celebrating "Grav (gravity)-mass" on December 25. The name and date are references to Isaac Newton, whose birthday falls on that day on the old style calendar (Old Style).<ref name="gravmass"/>

When asked about his influences, he replied that he admires Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ralph Nader, and Dennis Kucinich, and commented as well: "I admire Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, even though I criticize some of the things that they did."<ref name="fsfindia"/> Stallman is a Green Party (Green Party of the United States) supporter,<ref name="initials"/> and a supporter of the National Initiative proposal.<ref name="homepage"/> He has also publicly endorsed Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign bid (Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, 2016).[ ] Stallman criticizes the Israeli occupation of Palestine and has cancelled planned speeches at Israeli universities as part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.How it happened that I planned speeches at Israeli universities, then cancelled them.

Politically, Stallman has expressed that he is not an anarchist (Anarchism).Stallman joins the Internet, talks net neutrality, patents and more

Stallman recommends not owning a mobile phone,<ref name="gpl3-22june"/> as he believes the tracking of cell phones (Mobile phone tracking) creates harmful privacy issues.<ref name="infoweek"/> Also, Stallman avoids use of a key card to enter the building where his office is located.<ref name="shaggygod"/> Such a system would track the locations and times of doors entered. For personal reasons, he generally does not browse the web with an active connection on his personal computer; rather, he has a server fetch web pages with wget and send them to his e-mail mailbox, claiming to limit direct access via browsers to a few sites such as his own or those related to his work with GNU and the FSF.<ref name="strawmen"/><ref name="stallman-computing"/>

In a lecture in Manchester, England on May 1, 2008, Stallman advocated paper voting over machine voting, insisting that there was a much better chance of being able to do a recount correctly if there was a paper copy of the ballots.<ref name="ethics-and-society"/>

Stallman enjoys a wide range of musical styles from the works of Conlon Nancarrow<ref name="sterling"/> to folk (folk music);<ref name="homepage"/> the Free Software Song takes the form of alternative words for the Bulgarian folk dance Sadi Moma. More recently he wrote a send-up of the Cuban folk song Guantanamera, about a prisoner in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and recorded it in Cuba with Cuban musicians.<ref name="guantanamero"/> He also enjoys music by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and "Weird Al" Yankovic.<ref name="playlist"/>

Stallman is a fan of science fiction, including works by the author Greg Egan.<ref name="nearthwort"/> He occasionally goes to science fiction conventions<ref name="faif"/> and wrote the Free Software Song while awaiting his turn to sing at a convention. He has written and published online at least three science fiction short stories, "The Right to Read," "Made for You," and "Jinnetic Engineering". They have all been released under licenses that allow solely verbatim redistribution with attribution.Made For You <ref name="jinnetic"/>The Right to Read

Along with his native English, Stallman is also fluent enough in French and Spanish to deliver his two-hour speeches in those languages, and claims a "somewhat flawed" command of Indonesian (Indonesian language).<ref name="WGIG"/><ref name="gnome-malaysia"/> He has never married although often advertises semi-humorously for a companion.<ref name=stallman-personal-ad />