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Richard Stallman
{ RMS is a legend and overall a great human, but let's be reminded we shouldn't be creating any heroes or celebrities. ~drummyfish }
The great doctor Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS, also GNU/Stallman and saint IGNUcius, born 1953 in New York) is one of the biggest figures in software history, inventor of free (as in freedom) software, founder of the GNU project, Free Software Foundation, a great hacker and the author of a famous text editor Emacs. He is a non-religious Jew and an atheist (though he is the highest saint of Church Of Emacs), 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, for he started the wave of making free, ethical clones of proprietary programs.
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ASCII art of Richard Stallman
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. You should read this!
Richard Stallman is also famous for having foreseen and foretold virtually all the atrocities that corporations would do with computer technology, such as all the spying through cell phones, trade of personal data and abusing secrecy and "intellectual ownership" 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.
tl;dr: At 27 as an employee at MIT AI labs Stallman had a bad experience when trying to fix a Xerox printer who's proprietary 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 project on the Usenet -- this was a project to create a completely free as in freedom operating system, an alternative to the proprietary Unix 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. GNU and FSF popularized and standardized the term free (as in freedom) software, copyleft and free licensing, mainly with the GPL license. In the 90s GNU adopted the Linux operating system kernel and released a complete version of the GNU operating system -- these are nowadays known mostly as "Linux" distros. 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 Stallman has for his whole life strongly and tirelessly promoted free software and copyleft 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 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 or Socrates (who followed his own principles so much that he voluntarily died for them).
Fun fact: there is a package called vrms, for virtual RMS, that checks whether you have any non-free packages installed. Ironically it seems to not even tolerate non-free documentation under GFDL with invariant sections, which is very correct but probably not something Stallman himself would do since GFDL is basically his own invention :)
This said, we naturally also have to state we don't nearly agree with all he says. For example 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, see GFDL's "invariant seciotns", and his GNU project allows proprietary non-functional data as long as they are not "software"). Sadly he has also shown signs of being a type A fail personality by writing about some kind of newspeak "gender neutral language" and by seeming to be caught in a fight culture. On his website he also has an American flag and claims to be a patriot, i.e. leaning to nationalism and therefore fascism. 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 (mostly those opposing pedophile witch hunt, with which we DO agree) brought him a lot of trouble and an endless wrath of SJWs. For this he was cancelled and in 2019 was forced to resigned from the position of president of the FSF but continues to support it.
He is a weird guy, 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 slightly 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 a little bit of Indonesian and has many times proven his superior programming skills (even though he later stopped programming to fully work on promoting the FSF).
Stallman has a beautifully minimalist website at http://www.stallman.org where he actively comments on current news and issues. He also made the famous free software song (well, only the lyrics, the melody is taken from a Bulgarian folk song Sadi Moma) -- he often performs it in public himself (he is pretty good at keeping the weird rhythm of the song while at the same time also singing, that's impressive).
Stallman has been critical of capitalism though he probably isn't a hardcore anticapitalist (he's an American after all). Wikidata states he's a proponent of alter-globalization (not completely against globalization in certain areas but not supporting the current form of it).
In the book Free As In Freedom it is also mentioned that Stallman had aversion to passwords and secrecy in general -- at MIT he used the username RMS with the same password so that other people could easily log in through his account and access ARPANET (the predecessor of Internet). Indeed, we applaud this, the "sucurity" hysteria is killing the computing world.
As anarchists we of course despise the idea of worshiping people, creating heroes and cults of personalities, but the enormous historical significance of Stallman has to be stressed as a plain and simple fact and though we may disagree with some of his methods and even opinions, it's as clear as it can be that he acted selflessly, in favor of all people -- something that can be said about very few, if anyone at all. Most other old time hackers, such as Eric S. Ramyond and Rob Pike immediately abandoned all ideals of ethics and jumped the capitalist train with the first sight of money, Stallman stayed opposed to it, and for this he has our uttermost respect. Even though in our days his name is overshadowed in the mainstream by rich businessman and creators of commercially successful technology and even though we ourselves disagree with Stallman on some points, in the future history may well see Stallman as perhaps the greatest man of the software era, and rightfully so. Stallman isn't a mere creator of a commercially successful software product or a successful politician, he is an extremely morally strong philosopher, a great example to others, a prophet, someone who sees the truth and shows it to people -- he brilliantly foresaw the course of history and quickly defined ethics needed for the new era of mass available programmable computers at the right time, before the hammer hit. And not only that, he also basically alone established this ethics as a standard IN SPITE of all the world's corporations fighting back, in a field that back then was relatively obscure, unpopular in mainstream and hence not much supported by any mass media. He is also extremely unique in not pursuing self interest, in TRULY living his own philosophy, dedicating his whole life to his cause and refusing to give in even partially. All of this is at much higher level than simply becoming successful and famous within the contemporary capitalist system, his life effort is pure, true and timeless, unlike things achieved by pieces of shit such as Steve Jobs.