Concept

Richard Stallman

Overview

Richard Matthew Stallman ( STAWL-mən; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software which ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU C Compiler and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.

Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to write a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. With that he also launched the free software movement. He has been GNU Project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including among others, the GNU C Compiler (GCC) version 1.0 (that later was expanded and renamed GNU Compiler Collection), GNU Debugger, and GNU Emacs text editor.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify, and distribute free software. He 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 (which he refers to as digital restrictions management, calling the more common term misleading), software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, software protection dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats, and closed-source binary executables.

In September 2019, Stallman resigned as president of the FSF and left his visiting scientist role at MIT after making controversial comments about the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal. Stallman remained head of the GNU Project, and in 2021 returned to the FSF board of directors and others.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Much of what is called the "individualism" of the early nineteenth century has in truth little to do with the nature of individuals. It goes back to a metaphysics which held that harmony between man and nature can be taken for granted, if once certain artificial restrictions upon man are removed. Hence it neglected the necessity of studying and regulating industrial conditions so that a nominal freedom can be made…
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct
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On one hand, thinking deprived of its normal course takes refuge in academic specialism, comparable in its way to what is called scholasticism. On the other hand, the physical agencies of publicity which exist in such abundance are utilized in ways which constitute a large part of the present meaning of publicity: advertising, propaganda, invasion of private…
John Dewey, The public and its problems
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FLEISCHHAUER proceeded to describe various search and retrieval capabilities while ERWAY worked the computer. In this particular package the "go to" pull-down allowed the user in effect to jump out of Toolbook, where the interactive program was located, and enter the third-party software used by AM for this text collection, which is called Personal Librarian. This was the Windows version of Personal Librarian, a…
Library of Congress, Workshop on Electronic Texts
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