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# Richard Stallman
The great doctor Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS, also [GNU](gnu.md)/Stallman and saint IGNUcius, born 1953 in New York) is one of the biggest figures in software [history](history.md), inventor of [free software](free_software.md), founder of the [GNU project](gnu.md), [Free Software Foundation](fsf.md), a great [hacker](hacking.md) and the author of a famous text editor [Emacs](emacs.md). He is a non-religious [Jew](jew.md) and an [atheist](atheism.md) (though he is the highest saint of [Church Of Emacs](church_of_emacs.md)), a man who firmly stands behind his beliefs and who's been advocating for ethics and user freedom in the computing world.
The great doctor Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS, also [GNU](gnu.md)/Stallman and saint IGNUcius, born 1953 in New York) is one of the biggest figures in software [history](history.md), inventor of [free software](free_software.md), founder of the [GNU project](gnu.md), [Free Software Foundation](fsf.md), a great [hacker](hacking.md) and the author of a famous text editor [Emacs](emacs.md). He is a non-religious [Jew](jew.md) and an [atheist](atheism.md) (though he is the highest saint of [Church Of Emacs](church_of_emacs.md)), a man who firmly stands behind his beliefs and who's been advocating for ethics and user freedom in the computing world. He has also been called the *king of software [cloning](clone.md)*, for he started the wave of making free, ethical clones of proprietary programs.
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Stallman's life along with free software's history is documented by a free-licensed book named *Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software* on which he collaborated. You can get it gratis e.g. at [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5768). You should read this!
[tl;dr](tldr.md): At 27 as an employee at [MIT](mit.md) AI labs Stallman had a bad experience when trying to fix a Xerox printer who's [proprietary](proprietary.md) software source code was made inaccessible; he also started spotting the betrayal of hacker principles by others who decided to write proprietary software -- he realized proprietary software was inherently wrong as it prevented studying, improvement and sharing of software and enable abuse of users. From 1982 he was involved in a "fight" against the Symbolics company that pushed aggressive proprietary software; he was rewriting their software from scratch to allow Lisp Machine users more freedom -- here he proved his superior programming skills as he was keeping up with the whole team of Symbolics programmers. By 1983 his frustration reached its peak and he announced his [GNU](gnu.md) project on the [Usenet](usenet.md) -- this was a project to create a completely [free as in freedom](free_software.md) [operating system](os.md), an alternative to the proprietary [Unix](unix.md) system that would offer its users freedom to use, study, modify and share the whole software, in the hacker spirit. He followed by publishing a manifesto and establishing the [Free Software Foundation](fsf.md). GNU and FSF popularized and standardized the term [free (as in freedom) software](free_software.md), [copyleft](copyleft.md) and free licensing, e.g. with the [GPL](gpl.md) license. In the 90s GNU adopted the [Linux](linux.md) operating system kernel and released a complete version of the GNU operating system -- these are nowadays known mostly as "Linux" [distros](distro.md). As a head of FSF and GNU Stallman more or less stopped programming and started traveling around the world to give talks about free software and has earned his status of one of the most important people in software history.
[tl;dr](tldr.md): At 27 as an employee at [MIT](mit.md) AI labs Stallman had a bad experience when trying to fix a Xerox printer who's [proprietary](proprietary.md) software source code was made inaccessible; he also started spotting the betrayal of hacker principles by others who decided to write proprietary software -- he realized proprietary software was inherently wrong as it prevented studying, improvement and sharing of software and enable abuse of users. From 1982 he was involved in a "fight" against the Symbolics company that pushed aggressive proprietary software; he was rewriting their software from scratch to allow Lisp Machine users more freedom -- here he proved his superior programming skills as he was keeping up with the whole team of Symbolics programmers. By 1983 his frustration reached its peak and he announced his [GNU](gnu.md) project on the [Usenet](usenet.md) -- this was a project to create a completely [free as in freedom](free_software.md) [operating system](os.md), an alternative to the proprietary [Unix](unix.md) system that would offer its users freedom to use, study, modify and share the whole software, in the hacker spirit. He followed by publishing a manifesto and establishing the [Free Software Foundation](fsf.md). GNU and FSF popularized and standardized the term [free (as in freedom) software](free_software.md), [copyleft](copyleft.md) and free licensing, mainly with the [GPL](gpl.md) license. In the 90s GNU adopted the [Linux](linux.md) operating system kernel and released a complete version of the GNU operating system -- these are nowadays known mostly as "Linux" [distros](distro.md). As a head of FSF and GNU Stallman more or less stopped programming and started traveling around the world to give talks about free software and has earned his status of one of the most important people in software history.
Regarding [software](software.md) Stallman has for his whole life strongly and tirelessly promoted free software and [copyleft](copyleft.md) and has himself only used free software; he has always practiced what he preched and led the best example of how to live without [proprietary](proprietary.md) software. This is amazing. Nevertheless he isn't too concerned about [bloat](bloat.md) (judging by the GNU software and his own creation, [Emacs](emacs.md)) and he also doesn't care that much about [free culture](free_culture.md) (some of his written works prohibit modification and his GNU project allows proprietary non-functional data). Sadly he has also shown signs of being a [type A fail](fail_ab.md) personality by writing about some kind of [newspeak](newspeak.md) "*gender neutral language*" and by seeming to be caught in a [fight culture](fight_culture.md). Nevertheless he definitely can't be accused of populism or hypocrisy as he basically tells what he considers to be the truth no matter what, and he is very consistent in this. Some of his unpopular opinions brought him a lot of trouble, e.g. the wrath of [SJWs](sjw.md) in 2019 for his criticism of the [pedo](pedophile.md) witch hunt.