You cannot select more than 25 topics Topics must start with a letter or number, can include dashes ('-') and can be up to 35 characters long.

2.2 KiB

Richard Stallman

The great doctor Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS, born 1953 in New York) is one of the biggest figures in software history, inventor of free software, founder of the GNU project, free software foundation and the author of a famous text editor emacs.

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 for free e.g. at Project Gutenberg. You should read this!

Stallman has a beautifully minimalist website http://www.stallman.org where he actively comments on current news and issues.

Regarding software he has for his whole life strongly and tirelessly promoted free software and copyleft and has himself only used such software; he has always practiced what he preched and led the best example of how to live without proprietary software. This is amazing. Nevertheless he isn't too concerned about bloat (judging by the GNU software and his own creation, emacs) and he also doesn't care that much about free culture (some of his written works prohibit modification and his GNU project allows proprietary non-functional data).

RMS made the free software song (well, only the lyrics, the melody is taken from a Bulgarian folk song Sadi Moma).

He is a weird person, having been recorded on video eating dirt from his feet before giving a lecture. In the book Free as in Freedom he admits he might be autistic. Nevertheless he's pretty smart, has magna cum laude degree in physics from Harvard, 10+ honorary doctorates, fluently speaks English, Spanish and French and has many times proven his superior programming skills (even though he later stopped programming to fully work on promoting the FSF).

In 2019 Stallman was cancelled by SJW fascists for merely commenting rationally on the topic of child sexuality following the Epstein scandal. He resigned from the position of president of the FSF but continues to support it.