Richard Stallman
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.
He is 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 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. He was hired as an MIT hacker by Russ Noftsker, a man who would later found Symbolics and become a bitter opponent of Stallman.
At the age of nineteen, he worked for a timesharing company in Westchester County. His desk was adjacent to that of Eben Moglen.
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 change 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.
Trivia
- As well as "RMS", Stallman has been known to cultivate the humorous soubriquet "St. Ignucius"
- An aficionado of a wide range of music from Conlon Nancarrow to folk, Stallman is the author of the filky Free Software Song
- Stallman gave POSIX its name
- In 1977, Stallman published an AI technique known as "truth maintenance systems" for dependency-directed backtracking. The paper was co-authored by Gerald Jay Sussman [1]
- When asked who his influences are, he has remarked that he admires Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ralph Nader, and Dennis Kucinich. He has also commented: "I admire Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, even though I criticize some of the things that they did."
- At one point, Stallman named the HURD kernel Alix after his then-girlfriend.
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:
- 1990: MacArthur Fellowship
- 1991: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on the original Emacs editor
- 1996: Honorary doctorate degree from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology
- 1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award
- 1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award
- 2001: Second honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow
- 2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being (武田研究奨励賞)
- 2002: National Academy of Engineering membership
- 2003: Third honorary doctorate, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
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
- Richard Stallman's Personal Home Page
- GNU philosophy pages
- Original GNU announcement
- Free As In Freedom, by Sam Williams, a biography of Stallman licensed under the GNU FDL
- Free Software, Free Society, by Joshua Gay (ed), a selection of essays of Richard Stallman
- Stallman's 1986 speech in Sweden
- The GNU Philosophy pages ~50 essays, most are by RMS
- The GNU Philosophy Audio pages contains Ogg Vorbis recordings of 11 speeches by RMS, plus one video. (Includes RMS's talk given at ArsDigita University)
- Transcript and recordings of Stallman's speech at WSIS
- An interview with RMS, 21 July 2004
- Lecture in Lund, Sweden 2000-02-11, MPEG video