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Richard Matthew Stallman (nickname RMS) (born March 16, 1953) is both an acclaimed activist and hacker. He founded the GNU Project, and has been the operating system's lead architect and organizer. In the 1980s, he also co-founded the free software movement, the Free Software Foundation, and the League for Programming Freedom. Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the co-author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time as a political campaigner advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both patenting software and expansions of copyright law. Stallman's renowned software accomplishments include developing the original Emacs, GNU Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger.
Early years Stallman was born in Manhattan, New York, to Alice Lippman and Daniel Stallman. His first access to a computer came during his senior year at high school in 1969. Hired by the IBM New York Scientific Center, Stallman used the summer after his high-school graduation writing his first program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM 360. "I first wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembly language when the PL/I program was too big to fit in the computer" he later said. During this time, Stallman was also a volunteer Laboratory Assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in mathematics or physics, his teaching professor at Rockefeller thought he would have a future as a biologist.• In June 1971, as a first year student at Harvard University, Stallman became a programmer at the AI Laboratory of MIT, another university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There he became a regular in the hacker community. During these years, he was perhaps better known by his initials, "RMS." In the first edition of the Hacker's Dictionary, he wrote, "'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'." Stallman graduated from Harvard magna cum laude earning a BA in Physics in 1974. He then enrolled at MIT as a graduate student, but abandoned his pursuit of graduate degrees while remaining a programmer at the MIT AI Laboratory. In 1977, Stallman published an AI truth maintenance system called dependency-directed backtracking. The paper was co-authored by Gerald Jay Sussman. He jokes that "This is how the computer can avoid exploding when you ask it a self-contradictory question." As a hacker in MIT's AI laboratory, Stallman was an ardent critic of restricted computer access. When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman cracked the password system to reset passwords to null strings and sent users messages informing them of the removal of the password system. Although Stallman boasted of the success of his campaign for many years afterward, passwords ultimately triumphed. Decline of MITs hacker culture In the 1980s, the hacker community in which Stallman lived began to fragment. To prevent software from being used on their competitors' computers, most manufacturers stopped distributing source code and began using copyright and restrictive software licenses to limit or prohibit copying and redistribution. Such proprietary software had existed before, and it became apparent that it would become the norm. When Brian Reid in 1979 placed "time bombs" in Scribe to restrict unlicensed access to the software, Stallman proclaimed that "the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against humanity."• In 1980 Richard Greenblatt, a fellow AI lab hacker, founded Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI) to market Lisp machines, which he and Tom Knight designed at the lab. Greenblatt rejected outside investment, believing that the proceeds from the construction and sale of a few machines could be profitably reinvested in the growth of the company. In contrast, the other hackers felt that the venture capital-funded approach was better. As no agreement could be reached, they founded Symbolics, with the aid of Russ Noftsker, an AI Lab administrator. Symbolics recruited most of the remaining hackers including notable hacker Bill Gosper, who then left the AI lab. Symbolics forced Greenblatt to also resign by citing MIT policies. While both companies delivered proprietary software, Stallman believed that LMI, unlike Symbolics, had tried to avoid hurting the lab. For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman singlehandedly duplicated the efforts of the Symbolics programmers, in order to prevent them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers. However, he was the last of his generation of hackers at the lab. He rejected a future where he would have to sign non-disclosure agreements where he would have to agree not to share source code or technical information with other software developers, and perform other actions he considered betrayals of his principles. He chose instead to share his work with others in what he regarded as a classical spirit of collaboration. While Stallman did not participate in the counterculture of the 60s, he was inspired by its rejection of the pursuit of wealth as the primary goal of living. Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to "share with their neighbor" and to be able to study and make changes to the software that they use. He has repeatedly said that attempts by proprietary software vendors to prohibit these acts are "antisocial" and "unethical"•. The phrase "software wants to be free" is often incorrectly attributed to him, and Stallman argues that this is a misstatement of his philosophy. He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons e.g., because it may lead to improved software. In January 1984, he quit his job at MIT to work full time on the GNU project, which he had announced in September 1983. He did not complete a Ph.D. but has been awarded four honorary degrees (see list below). GNU Project Stallman announced the plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on several ARPAnet mailing lists and USENET. In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. The FSF is incorporated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and is tax-exempt under 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows donors who file US Federal Income Tax returns to get a deduction on their taxes for their donations. Stallman is the unsalaried president of the Free Software Foundation. In 1985, Stallman invented and popularized the concept of copyleft, a legal mechanism to protect the modification and redistribution rights for free software. It was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License, and in 1989 the first program-independent GNU General Public License (GPL) was released. By then, much of the GNU system had been completed. Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor, compiler, debugger, and a build automator. The notable exception was a kernel. In 1990, members of the GNU project began a kernel called GNU Hurd, which has yet to achieve widespread usage. By producing software tools needed to write software, and publishing a generalized license (the GPL) that could be applied to any software project, Stallman helped make it easier for others to write free software independent of the GNU project. In 1991, one such independent project produced the Linux kernel. This could be combined with the GNU system to make a complete operating system. Most people use the name Linux to refer to both the combinations of the Linux kernel itself plus the GNU system, which Stallman claims unfairly disparages the value of the GNU project, as discussed below in GNU/Linux. Stallman's influences on hacker culture include the name POSIX• and the Emacs editor. On UNIX systems, GNU Emacs's popularity rivaled that of another editor vi, spawning an editor war. Stallman's humorous take on this was to jokingly canonize himself as "St. Ignucius" / "St. IGNUcius" of the Church of Emacs. Around 1992, developers at Lucid Inc. doing their own work on Emacs clashed with Stallman and ultimately forked the software, creating what's now known as XEmacs. An email archive published by Jamie Zawinski documents their criticisms and Stallman's response.• Ulrich Drepper published complaints against Stallman in the release notes for glibc 2.2.4•, where he accuses RMS of attempting a "hostile takeover" of the project, referring to him as a "control freak and raging manic." Eric S. Raymond, who sometimes speaks for parts of the open source movement, has written many pieces laying out that movement's disagreement with Stallman and the free software movement, often in terms sharply critical of Stallman.• Activism Stallman has written many essays on software freedom and is a voice of action in the free software movement. In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free on-line encyclopedia through the means of inviting the public to contribute articles. See GNUPedia.• Stallman's staunch advocacy for free software inspired "Virtual Richard M. Stallman" (vrms), software that analyzes the packages currently installed on a Debian GNU/Linux system, and report those that are from the non-free tree. The vrms software is no longer maintained and Stallman would disagree with parts of Debian's definition of free software anyway. Stallman endorses Ututo, BLAG Linux and GNU, Dynebolic, GNUstep, Musix, and Agnula, 6 distributions of GNU/Linux for people to use.•• Since the early-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time as a political campaigner and his speeches reflect this. The three speeches he gives most often are "The GNU project and the Free Software movement," "The Dangers of Software Patents," and "Copyright and Community in the age of computer networks." In 2006, during the year-long public consultation for the drafting of version 3 of the GNU General Public License, he's added a fourth speech explaining the proposed changes. Transcripts have been made of five of his "GPLv3" speeches, and two of his software patent speeches. In August 2006 at his meetings with the government of the Indian State of Kerala, he persuaded officials to discard proprietary software, such as Microsoft, at state-run schools. This has resulted in a landmark decision to switch all school computers in 12,500 high schools from Windows to a free software operating system. Lifestyle Stallman doesn't own any housing, a car, or a cellphone. Stallman has described his lifestyle as "living cheaply" and compared it to living "like a student". He prefers that "money" not tell him "what to do". He once urged those in attendance of a talk, "avoid getting sucked into all of the expensive lifestyle habits of typical Americans", but instead "do what's really important to you". He lives off speaker fees and prize money from awards he has won. Stallman is a native English speaker, has a moderately fluent command of French and Spanish, and, by his own assessment, intermediate Indonesian. He feels he has mastered a language when he can make puns in it. In his online personal ad he declares himself an "atheist, reputedly intelligent, with unusual interests in politics, science, music, and dance". He enjoys a wide range of music from Conlon Nancarrow to folk, and is the author of the filkish Free Software Song. He has performed renaissance music and Balinese gamelan music, as well as international folk dance. He plays the recorder. Stallman is a science fiction fan. He occasionally goes to science fiction conventions• and has written a few sci-fi stories, notably The Right to Read. When asked who his influences are, he has remarked that he admires Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ralph Nader, and Dennis Kucinich. He has also commented: "I admire Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, even though I criticize some of the things that they did." Stallman is also on the Advisory Council of teleSUR, a Latin American television station. By most conventional standards, Stallman's personal hygiene would likely be considered appalling. For example, Stallman is known to pick out knots from his hair and toss them in the soup he is eating, as Eben Moglen recalls in Free as in Freedom. As Forbes writer Daniel Lyons describes, "His own Web site... says Stallman engages in what he calls 'rhinophytophilia'—'nasal sex' (also his term) with flowers; he brags of offending a bunch of techies from Texas Instruments by plunging his schnoz into a bouquet at dinner and inviting them to do the same." Terminology Stallman places great importance on the words, labels, and groupings of topics people use to talk about the world, including the relationship between software and freedom. In particular, he untiringly asks people to say "free software," "GNU/Linux," and to avoid the term "intellectual property." His requests that people use certain terms, and his ongoing efforts to convince people of the importance of terminology, are a source of regular mis-understanding and friction with parts of the free and open source software community. One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the journalist agree to use his terminology throughout their article. Sometimes he has even required journalists to read parts of the GNU philosophy before an interview, for "efficiency's sake." He has been known to turn down speaking requests over some terminology issues. Free software Stallman accepts terms such as "software libre", FLOSS, and "unfettered software," but prefers the term "free software" since a lot of energy has been invested in that term. For similar reasons, he argues for the term "proprietary software" rather than "closed source software", when referring to software that is not free software. In the English language, the term "free software", however, can mean either "unrestricted software" or "zero-cost software" or both. Over the years, people have tried to come up with a more intuitive and less ambiguous term. Stallman strongly objects to the term "open source" to replace the term "free" since he says it hides the goal of freedom. He declines interviews for stories that would label his work as "open source," claiming that they would misrepresent his views. GNU/Linux
Copyright, patents, and trademarks Stallman argues that the term "Intellectual Property" is designed to confuse people, and is used to prevent intelligent discussion on the specifics of copyright, patent, and trademark laws, respectively, by lumping together areas of law that are more dissimilar than similar. He also argues that by referring to these laws as "property" laws, the term biases the discussion when thinking about how to treat these issues. "These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues. Copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of a work of authorship or art. Patent law was intended to encourage publication of ideas, at the price of finite monopolies over these ideas--a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others. Trademark law was not intended to promote any business activity, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying." Other terminology issues Stallman recommends avoiding certain terms he considers misleading, and advocates using other terms instead. An example of Stallman cautioning others to avoid common but misleading (or loaded) terminology, while also offering suggestions for possible alternatives, is this paragraph of an email by Stallman to a public mailing list:
See the "Words to avoid" essay on the GNU website. Here are a few examples: Recognition Stallman has received much recognition for his work, including: Awards Honors Publications As well as the following books and journal articles, Stallman has published a science fiction story and numerous essays about the free software movement – many are at www.gnu.org/philosophy on the GNU Project website and others are at his personal web site, stallman.org. Two notable documents are the GNU Manifesto and The Free Software Definition. See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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