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 :-P . 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 … [Read more...]