Richard Matthew Stallman

Background...

• Born: March 16, 1953, New York City
• Parents: Daniel Stallman and Alice Lippman
• Atheist
• www.stallman.org
• Hired by IBM New York Scientific Center
• preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM 360
• Harvard University
  
• programmer at the AI Laboratory of MIT
• regular in the hacker community: “RMS”
• graduated from Harvard magna cum laude earning a BA in Physics in 1974
• knee injury
• awarded six honorary doctorates and two honorary professorships

Where it all began...

• MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977
• decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password
• to demonstrate that they were not increasing security, but only hindering free access to each other's software and discouraging sharing it

Works...

• AI truth maintenance system called dependency-directed backtracking with Gerald Jay Sussman
• early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems
• TECO, Emacs, and the Lisp Machine Operating System
• Copyleft
• is a play on the word copyright
• practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions
  
• requires the same freedom be preserved in modified versions
• author surrenders some but not all rights under copyright law
• GNU General Public License, Tiny BASIC
• GNU Project
• “GNU's Not Unix”
• September 1983
• free Unix-like operating system
• free software movement
• GNU/Linux operating system
• incorrectly called Linux
  
• Free Software Foundation
• October 1985

Some humor...

• “I am also a saint, in the Church of Emacs--Saint IGNUcius...”
• "There are no godfathers in the Church of Emacs, since there are no gods, but you can be someone's editorfather."

Sources:
http://www.stallman.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
http://www.gnu.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft