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@ -19,6 +19,8 @@ Stallman's life along with free software's history is documented by a free-licen
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Richard Stallman is also famous for having foreseen and foretold virtually all the atrocities that [corporations](corporation.md) would do with computer technology, such as all the spying through cell phones, trade of personal data and abusing secrecy and "[intellectual ownership](intellectual_property.md)" of source code for bullying others, though to be honest it doesn't take a genius to foresee that corporations will want to rape people as much as possible, it's more of a surprise he was one of very few who did. The important thing is he acted immediately he spotted this -- though corporations indeed did go on to rape people anyway, Richard Stallman made some very important steps early on to make the impact much less catastrophic nowadays. We should be all grateful.
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It seems that **Stallman had at least one girlfriend**; in the 1999 book called *Open Sources* he says that he originally wanted to name the [HURD](hurd.md) kernel Alix after a [girl](woman.md) that was at the time his "sweetheart".
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[tl;dr](tldr.md): At 27 as an employee at [MIT](mit.md) [AI](ai.md) 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.
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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 preached and led the best example of how to live without [proprietary](proprietary.md) software. This in itself is extremely amazing and rare, regardless of whether he ever slipped (which we aren't aware of) or to what degree we agree with his ideas; his moral strength and integrity is really what makes him special among basically all other great people of recent centuries, it's really as if he comes from a different time when people TRULY internally believed something so much they would die for it, that they wouldn't sell even a small part of that belief for any kind of personal benefit; this is something that really puts him alongside the greatest philosophers such as [Plato](plato.md) or [Socrates](socrates.md) (who followed his own principles so much that he voluntarily died for them).
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