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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 Stallman taken from the cover of the O'Reilly book by Sam Williams , published on March 1March 1 is the 60th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (61st in leap years). There are 305 days remaining. Events BC 29 BC Horace writes the ode Occidit Daci Cotisonis agmen''. AD First thousand years 286 Maximian proclaimed junior Roman emperor., 20022002 is a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). 2002 was the first palindromic year since 1991 and the last until 2112. 2002 was also designated: International Year of Ecotourism and Mountains National Science Year in the United Kingdom.

He is a notable programmer whose major accomplishments include GNU Emacs, the GNU C CompilerThe GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC is a set of programming language compilers produced by the GNU Project. It is free software distributed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) under the GNU GPL, and is a key component of the GNU toolch, and the GNU DebuggerThe GNU Debugger usually called just GDB is the standard debugger for the GNU software system. It is a portable debugger which runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including C, C++, and FORTRAN. Originally written by Ri. Since the mid- 1990sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s 2040s Years: Events and trends Computers, technology Explosive growth of the Internet; decrease in the cost of computers and other techn 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 fellowshipsA fellow in its broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. When describing the term in relation to colleges the term refers to an incorporated (not in its legal sense) member of such a body of people. As a consequence, in the language of Brit, maintaining a modest standard of living while discharging his duties as an itinerant evangelist and " philosopher" of free software.

1 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)

Stallman went on to other jobs where he would gain important contacts and experience in computing. In 1971, as a freshman at Harvard University, Stallman became a hacker at the MIT AI Laboratory. He was hired by Russ Noftsker, a man who would later found Symbolics and become a bitter opponent of Stallman. Later, at the age of nineteen, he worked for a timesharing company in Westchester County with a desk adjacent to that of Eben Moglen, now a well known technology attorney.



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