Richard Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often shortened to rms, is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement; in October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, and many tools in the GNU Coreutils. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

Early years

Stallman was born to Daniel Stallman and Alice Lippman, in 1953 in New York City. His first experience with computers was while in high school at the IBM New York Scientific Center. He was hired for the summer to write a numerical analysis program in Fortran. He completed the task after a couple of weeks and spent the rest of the summer writing a text editor in APL. Stallman spent the summer after his high-school graduation writing another program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM System/360.

During this time, Stallman was also a volunteer laboratory assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in mathematics or physics, his teaching professor at Rockefeller thought he would have a future as a biologist.

In June 1971, as a first-year student at Harvard University, Stallman was known for his strong performance in Math 55, and became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. There he became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, rms (which was the name of his computer accounts). In the first edition of the Hacker's Dictionary, he wrote, "'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'."

Stallman then enrolled as a graduate student in physics at MIT, but abandoned his graduate studies while remaining a programmer at the MIT AI Laboratory. At the end of his first year in the graduate program, Stallman suffered a knee injury that ended his participation in international folk dancing. Stallman abandoned his pursuit of a doctorate in physics in favor of programming.

While a graduate student at MIT, Stallman published a paper on an AI truth maintenance system called dependency-directed backtracking with Gerald Jay Sussman. This paper was an early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems. As of 2003, the technique Stallman and Sussman introduced is still the most general and powerful form of intelligent backtracking. The technique of constraint recording, wherein partial results of a search are recorded for later reuse, was also introduced in this paper.

Decline of MIT's hacker culture

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the hacker culture that Stallman thrived on began to fragment. To prevent software from being used on their competitors' computers, most manufacturers stopped distributing source code and began using copyright and restrictive software licenses to limit or prohibit copying and redistribution. Such proprietary software had existed before, and it became apparent that it would become the norm. This shift in the legal characteristics of software can be regarded as a consequence triggered by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, as stated by Stallman's MIT fellow Brewster Kahle.

When Brian Reid in 1979 placed time bombs in Scribe to restrict unlicensed access to the software, Stallman proclaimed it "a crime against humanity." He clarified, years later, that it is blocking the user's freedom that he believes is a crime, not the issue of charging for the software.

In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused access to the source code for the software of the first laser printer, the Xerox 9700. Stallman had modified the software on an older printer (the XGP, Xerographic Printer), so it electronically messaged a user when the person's job was printed, and would message all logged-in users when a printer was jammed. Not being able to add this feature to the Dover printer was a major inconvenience, as the printer was on a different floor from most of the users. This one experience convinced Stallman of people's need to be free to modify the software they use.

Richard Greenblatt, a fellow AI Lab hacker, founded Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI) to market Lisp machines, which he and Tom Knight designed at the lab. Greenblatt rejected outside investment, believing that the proceeds from the construction and sale of a few machines could be profitably reinvested in the growth of the company. In contrast, the other hackers felt that the venture capital-funded approach was better. As no agreement could be reached, hackers from the latter camp founded Symbolics, with the aid of Russ Noftsker, an AI Lab administrator. Symbolics recruited most of the remaining hackers including notable hacker Bill Gosper, who then left the AI Lab. Symbolics forced Greenblatt to also resign by citing MIT policies. While both companies delivered proprietary software, Stallman believed that LMI, unlike Symbolics, had tried to avoid hurting the lab's community. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers.

Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to share with their neighbor and to be able to study and make changes to the software that they use. He maintains that attempts by proprietary software vendors to prohibit these acts are antisocial and unethical. He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons such as possibly developing technically superior software.

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

GNU project

) at Netaji Subhash Engineering College, Calcutta, India]] Stallman announced the plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on several ARPANET mailing lists and USENET.

In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix." Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. Stallman is the nonsalaried president of the FSF, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in Massachusetts. Stallman popularized the concept of copyleft, a legal mechanism to protect the modification and redistribution rights for free software. It was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License, and in 1989 the first program-independent GNU General Public License (GPL) was released. By then, much of the GNU system had been completed. Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor (Emacs), compiler (GCC), debugger (gdb), and a build automator (gmake). The notable exception was a kernel. In 1990, members of the GNU project began a kernel called GNU Hurd, which has yet to achieve the maturity level required for widespread usage.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, used the GNU development tools to produce the Linux kernel. The existing programs from the GNU project were readily ported to run on the resultant platform; most sources use the name Linux to refer to the general-purpose operating system thus formed. This has been a longstanding naming controversy in the free software community. Stallman argues that not using GNU in the name of the operating system unfairly disparages the value of the GNU project and harms the sustainability of the free software movement by breaking the link between the software and the free software philosophy of the GNU project.

's book ]]

Stallman's influences on hacker culture include the name POSIX and the Emacs editor. On UNIX systems, GNU Emacs's popularity rivaled that of another editor vi, spawning an editor war. Stallman's take on this was to jokingly canonize himself as St. IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs and acknowledge that "vi vi vi is the editor of the beast," while "using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance." Technology journalist Andrew Leonard has characterized what he sees as Stallman's uncompromising stubbornness as common among elite computer programmers:

Free software activism

Stallman has written many essays on software freedom and since the early 1990s has been an outspoken political campaigner for the free software movement. The speeches he has regularly given are titled The GNU project and the Free Software movement, The Dangers of Software Patents, and Copyright and Community in the age of computer networks. His uncompromising attitude on ethical issues concerning computers and software has caused some people to label him as radical and extremist. 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.

Stallman's staunch advocacy for free software inspired the Virtual Richard M. Stallman (vrms), software that analyzes the packages currently installed on a Debian GNU/Linux system, and report those that are from the non-free tree. Stallman would disagree with parts of Debian's definition of free software.

In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free on-line encyclopedia through the means of inviting the public to contribute articles. See GNUPedia.

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. Although generally supportive of Hugo Chávez, Stallman has criticised some policies on television broadcasting, free speech rights, and privacy in meetings with Chávez and in public speeches in Venezuela. Stallman is on the Advisory Council of teleSUR, a Latin American television station.

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 to a free software operating system.

After personal meetings, Stallman has obtained positive statements about the free software movement from the then-President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, French 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, and the president of Ecuador Rafael Correa.

at WSIS-2005]]

Stallman has participated in protests about software patents, DRM, and proprietary software.

Protesting against proprietary software in April 2006, Stallman held a "Don't buy from ATI, enemy of your freedom" placard at a speech by an ATI representative in the building where Stallman works, resulting in the police being called. ATI has since merged with AMD Corporation and has taken steps to make their hardware documentation available for use by the free software community.

Stallman has also helped and supported the International Music Score Library Project in getting back online, after it had been taken down on October 19, 2007 following a cease and desist letter from Universal Edition.

Stallman's only computer is a Lemote Yeeloong netbook (using the same company's Loongson processor) which he chose because it can run with 100% free software even 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." Lemote is a joint venture of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an institution of the State Council of China.

Stallman has suggested that the United States Government is encouraging the use of cloud computing because this allows them to access user's data without needing a search warrant.

Terminology

, IIT Bombay, India]]

Stallman places great importance on the words and labels people use to talk about the world, including the relationship between software and freedom. He untiringly asks people to say free software and GNU/Linux, and to avoid the terms intellectual property and piracy (in relation to copyright). His requests that people use certain terms, and his ongoing efforts to convince people of the importance of terminology are a source of regular misunderstanding and friction with parts of the free software and open source communities.

One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the journalist agree to use his terminology throughout the article. Sometimes he has even required journalists to read parts of the GNU philosophy before an interview, for "efficiency's sake". He has been known to turn down speaking requests over some terminology issues.

Stallman rejects a common alternative term, open source software, because it does not call to mind what Stallman sees as the value of the software: freedom. Thus it will not inform people of the freedom issues, and will not lead to people valuing and defending their freedom. Two alternatives which Stallman does accept are software libre and unfettered software, but free software is the term he asks people to use in English. For similar reasons, he argues for the term "proprietary software" rather than "closed source software", when referring to software that is not free software.

Stallman repeatedly asks that the term GNU/Linux, which he pronounces "GNU slash Linux", be used to refer to the operating system created by combining the GNU system and the Linux kernel. Stallman refers to this operating system as "a variant of GNU, and the GNU Project is its principal developer." Starting around 2003, he began also using the term GNU+Linux, which he pronounces "GNU plus Linux".

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. 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.

An example of cautioning others to avoid other terminology while also offering suggestions for possible alternatives, is this sentence of an email by Stallman to a public mailing list: }}

Personal life

Stallman has devoted the bulk of his life’s energies to political and software activism. Professing to care little for material wealth, he explains that "I've always lived cheaply ... like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do."

Stallman maintained no permanent residence outside his office at MIT's CSAIL Lab, sometimes describing himself as a squatter on campus. His position as a research affiliate at MIT is unpaid.

In a footnote to an article he wrote in 1999, he says "As an atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said."

Stallman chooses not to celebrate Christmas, instead celebrating on December 25 a holiday of his own invention, Grav-mass. The name and date are references to Isaac Newton, whose birthday falls on that day on the old style calendar.

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." Stallman is a Green Party supporter,

Stallman recommends not owning a mobile phone, as he believes the tracking of cell phones creates harmful privacy issues. Also, Stallman avoids use of a key card to enter the building where his office is. Such a system would track doors entered and times. For personal reasons, he generally does not actively browse the web from his computer; rather, he uses wget and reads the fetched pages from 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.

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.

Stallman enjoys a wide range of musical styles from the works of Conlon Nancarrow to folk; the Free Software Song takes the form of alternative words for the Bulgarian folk dance Sadi Moma. More recently he wrote a take-off on the Cuban folk song Guantanamera, about a prisoner in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and recorded it in Cuba with Cuban musicians. He also enjoys music by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and Weird Al Yankovic.

Stallman is a fan of science fiction, including works by the author Greg Egan. He occasionally goes to science fiction conventions and wrote the Free Software Song while awaiting his turn to sing at a convention. He has written two science fiction stories, The Right to Read and Jinnetic Engineering.

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.

==Recognition== Stallman has received the following recognition for his work:

1986: Honorary lifetime membership of the Chalmers University of Technology Computer Society

1990: Exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship ("genius grant") 1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award "For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)." 1996: Honorary doctorate from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology 1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award 1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award 2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being () 2001: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow 2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership 2003: Honorary doctorate, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel 2004: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Nacional de Salta.

2004: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú.

2007: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.

2007: First Premio Iternacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre

2007: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote.

2007: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Pavia

2008: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru

2009: Honorary doctorate, from Lakehead University

Selected publications

Stallman has written and been the subject of several books:

;Papers in technical and academic journals:

Richard Stallman, Reevaluating Copyright: The Public Must Prevail, Oregon Law Review 75(1) 1996.

;Manuals:

;

;Biography:

Stallman has four topics that he has spoken on often:

The GNU project and the free software movement, March 3, 2006

The Dangers of Software Patents, May 24, 2004

Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks, April 19, 2001

The GNU GPL, and GPLv3, April 1, 2007

Quotations

"People get the government their behavior deserves. People deserve better than that."

"Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone."

"Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers' feelings."

"I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about 'open source' thinking that I work under that banner."

See also

Hacker ethic

History of free software

Lisp Machine Lisp

Copyleft

Revolution OS

9882 Stallman

References

External links

Stallman.org – Stallman's personal homepage

Stallman's blog

Essays on the GNU philosophy pages, mostly by Stallman

Richard Stallman interview on the OWASP Podcast Series March 30, 2009

Richard Stallman Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler radio show March 23, 2005

Richard Stallman Playlist Appearance on WMBR's Dinnertime Sampler radio show March 24, 2004

Not Free at Any Price – Stallman on his opposition to the One Laptop Per Child program in the Boston Review

Richard M. Stallman Speeches - Upcoming events for RMS

Richard Stallman talk+Q&A; at the useR! 2010 conference (audio files attached)

Category:1953 births Category:American atheists Category:American bloggers Category:American computer programmers Category:Articles containing video clips Category:Artificial intelligence researchers Category:Computer pioneers Category:Copyright activists Category:Emacs Category:Filkers Category:Free software programmers Category:GNU people Category:Grace Murray Hopper Award laureates Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Lisp programming language Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Members of the Free Software Foundation board of directors Category:Programming language designers Category:Living people Category:Unix people