Richard Matthew Stallman - A Brief Biography

Richard Matthew Stallman

The Father Of Free Software

Early Life and Education

Richard Matthew Stallman was born in Manhattan, New York,on born March 16, 1953. He first accessed a computer during his senior year at high school in 1969.

He was hired by IBM New York Scientific Centre, while he was still in high-school. He wrote his first program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM 360.

In June 1971, as a first year student at Harvard University, Stallman became a pro-grammer at the AI Laboratory of MIT.

Stallman graduated from Harvard earning a BA in Physics in 1974. He then en-rolled at MIT as a graduate student, but abandoned his pursuit of a graduate degree while remaining a programmer at the MIT AI Laboratory.

In 1977, Stallman published a paper on an AI truth maintenance system called de-pendency-directed backtracking.

Contributions

GNU Project – Free Software FoundationIn 1983 he started GNU project and in January 1984, Stall-man quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU proj-ect, he founded the GNU Project to create a free unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead archi-tect and organizer.

He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989 to unite free software developers as well as develop-ers of proprietary software to fight against software pat-ents and the extension of the scope of copyright.

He also introduced the concept of copyleft to protect the ideals of this movement, and enshrined this concept in the widely-used GPL (General Public License) for software, the most widely used free software license.

Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded by Rich-ard Stallman on 4 October 1985, targeted towards the growth of new free generation of users as our life every day gives us more reasons to use different software.

Interesting fact that free software foundation itself uses only free software for their work, as it is their life’s princi-ple.

Every year thousands of corporations and individual soft-ware developers register their copyrights with enforcing the license and the US copyright office through Compli-ance Lab and Free Software Licensing.

Emacs

The most popular, and most ported, version of Emacs is GNU Emacs, which was created by Stallman for the GNU Project.

Emacs is Extensible - The GNU Emacs manual describes Emacs as the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor.

Emacs Integrates well with lots of external tools, it pro-vides commands to manipulate words and paragraphs, syntax highlighting for making source code easier to read, and keyboard macros for performing user-defined batches of editing commands.

Open Source vs Free Software

Richard Stallman is known as a person who fought all his life for right definitions of his project. Open Source vs Free Software has always been a source of misunderstanding between the respective user communities.

When you are speaking about free software, avoid saying “for free” or “giveaway”, as it will change the meaning to the issue about the cost, not the freedom, as human rights.

Awards and Achievments

In 1991 Stallman was awarded by The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper for pio-neering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)."

In 2013 the Internet Hall of Fame inducted Stallman for his contributions as creator of the GNU Project, main author of the GNU General Public License, and his philosophical contributions as founder of the free software move-ment.Opinion/Views