Richard Stallman

Posted by jadah on March 10, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Imagine Santa Claus as young. Imagine he’s a free software radical. Even more, imagine he founded the Free Software Foundation. You’re seeing Richard Stallman in your mind .

The source of wisdom and inspiration for many programmers around the globe, Richard is well-known for criticizing the use of “Linux” for talking about the full, Linux-based Operative System “GNU-Linux”.

Stallman was born in 1953 in New York City, and got a BA in Physics from Harvard, in 1974. He enrolled at MIT and became an usual in the MIT’s AI Lab. In the late 70′s and early 80′s, closed-source proprietary software became more common. Actually, an incident with a printer (Stallman was denied access to the driver source code: he tried to modify it in order to send messages to users when the printer finished a job or was unavailable) triggered him to become a Free Software activist.

In 1983 Stallman began the GNU project, aimed to create a free and open source operative system. Soon after, he founded a non-profit organization to employ programmers and provide a legal infrastructure: the Free Software Foundation.

In 1991 only a part of the operative system (although the most important one) was missing: the kernel. That’s when Linus Torvalds created Linux, and it was adopted in order to complete the GNU/Linux project.

Richard is, certainly, an influential person. He has had many personal interviews with presidents all over the world, including Venezuela, India, Ecuador, and others. His constant efforts to promote and improve Free Software, as well as the handling of English, French and Spanish, make him a respected speaker.

Stallman’s only personal computer is a Lemote Yeeloong Netbook, chosen because it can run 100% free software even from a BIOS Level. He doesn’t use a mobile phone, nor does he recommends it, due to “harmful privacy issues”. He doesn’t like using a browser, but fetches pages via “wget” (a command which gets the full source HTML of a web page) and reads it in his email inbox.

Lately, many Free-Software leaders have criticized Stallman about “fundamentalist” positions. Nevertheless, his position as a founder makes his biography worth checking out.

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