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Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS; born March 16,
1953) is the founder of the Free
Software movement, the GNU project, the Free Software
Foundation, and the League for
Programming Freedom. He invented 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.
An image of Richard Matthew Stallman taken from the cover of the O'Reilly book Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams, published in March, 2002. He is also a notable programmer whose major accomplishments
include GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. Since
the mid 1990s Stallman has relinquished most of his software engineering duties in order to focus on the advocacy of free
software. His remaining development time is devoted to GNU Emacs. He is currently supported by various fellowships, maintaining a
modest standard of living while discharging his duties as an itinerant evangelist and "philosopher" of free software.
Biography
Stallman was born on March 16, 1953 in
Manhattan to Alice Lippman and Daniel Stallman. He is perhaps better known by his
initials, "RMS". In the first edition of the Hacker's
dictionary, he wrote, '"Richard Stallman" is just my mundane name; you can call me "rms".'
In the 1960s, with the personal computer still a decade away, Stallman's first opportunity to gain access to a computer came
during his junior year at high school. Hired by the IBM New York Scientific Center, a now-defunct research facility in
downtown Manhattan, Stallman spent the summer after his high-school graduation
writing his first program, a preprocessor for the IBM 7094 written in the PL/I programming language. "I
first wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembler language when the PL/I program was too big to fit in the computer", he
later revealed (Williams 2002, chapter 3 ).
After that job, Stallman held a Laboratory Assistant position in the Biology Department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a
career in mathematics or physics, his analytical mind impressed the lab director so much that only a few years after Stallman had
departed for college, his mother received an unexpected phone call. "It was the professor at Rockefeller", she recalled. "He
wanted to know how Richard was doing. He was surprised to learn that he was working in computers. He'd always thought Richard had
a great future ahead of him as a biologist." (Williams 2002, chapter 3 )
In 1971, as a freshman at Harvard University, Stallman became a hacker at the MIT AI Laboratory.
Decline of the hacker culture
In the 1980s, the hacker
community that dominated Stallman's life began to dissolve under the pressure of the commercialization of the software
industry. In particular, a group of breakaway AI Lab hackers founded the company Symbolics, which actively attempted to recruit the rest of the AI Lab hackers in order to replace the free
software in the Lab with its own proprietary software.
For two years, from 1981 to 1983, Stallman
single-handedly duplicated the efforts of the Symbolics programmers to prevent them from gaining a monopoly on the Lab's
computers. By that time, however, he was the last of his generation of hackers at the Lab. He was asked to sign non-disclosure agreements and perform other actions he
considered betrayals of his principles, but chose instead to share his work with others in what he regarded as a classical spirit
of scientific collaboration and openness.
Stallman's philosophy was that "software wants to be free": if a user or fellow hacker benefited from a particular piece of
software it was the developer's right - and indeed duty - to allow them to use and improve it without artificial hindrance or
restrictions on their rights to pass the original or derivative works onto others. Consequently, in January 1984, he quit his job
at MIT to work full time on the GNU project, which he'd announced in September 1983. He has worked on GNU more or less full-time
since then, and did not complete a doctoral degree. He has been awarded three honorary doctoral degrees.
Founding GNU
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 incorporated the non-profit Free Software Foundation (FSF) to employ free
software programmers and provide a legal framework for the free software community.
In 1989 Stallman invented and popularized the concept of copyleft. By
then, much of the GNU system had been completed, with the notable exception of a kernel. Members of the GNU project were working on a kernel called GNU Hurd, but a risky design decision proved to be a bad gamble, and development of the Hurd was slow.
In 1991, this final gap was filled by Linux, a kernel written independently of the GNU project using the GNU development tools and system libraries.
The arrival of Linux, and the availability of a completely free operating system created some confusion, however, and most people now use the name Linux to refer to the
whole operating system. Stallman has attempted to correct this by asking people to call the operating system "GNU/Linux".
Free software and open source
Richard Stallman's political and moral pronouncements have made him a controversial figure. Some influential programmers who
agree with the concept of sharing code disagree with Stallman's moral stance, personal philosophy, or the language he uses to
describe his positions. One result of these disputes was the establishment in 1998 of a new movement, the open source movement, whose aims are broadly similar, but whose proponents emphasize
the technical merits of code developed in an open fashion, rather than the principles of liberty and freedom.
Few who have encountered Stallman or read his essays would deny that he is a man of deeply held (and readily expressed)
convictions; this has been interpreted in both a positive and negative light. He has been the subject (some would say the
instigator) of a number of widely-publicized flamewars on discussion forums such as
the Linux kernel mailing list. Although
occasionally for technical reasons (Tcl vs. Scheme), most of these flamewars have revolved around the use of non-free
software.
Media appearances
The movie documentary Revolution OS features several
interviews with Stallman from his MIT days to 2001.
Recognition
Stallman has received numerous prizes and awards for his work, amongst them:
See also
Bibliography
- Williams, Sam (2002) Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free
Software, O'Reilly Press ISBN
0596002874 (also available over the web under the GFDL, see link below).
- Gay, Joshua (ed) (2002): Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston: GNU Press.
ISBN 1882114981 (also available over
the web, see link below).
External links
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