Richard Stallman, The Guy Behind Free Software Movement

Richard Stallman is a world-class programmer, hacker, and freedom fighter. He started the free software movement, which was one of the main reasons that leads to the birth of Linux operating system.

Who He Is

Born March 16, 1953, Richard Matthew Stallman, whose hacker name is rms, is arguably the world’s most famous hacker of all time.

He was the founder and long-time chairman of Free Software Foundation. He was the author of Emacs editor, which is the powerful editor still used by lots of people today.

Timeline

1970 was the year he became a Harvard University Student. In 1971, he became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 1983, he announced the plan for the GNU operating system to build an operating system that everybody can use for free. 2002, he got US National Academy of Engineering membership.

Linux and Him

He was important for the birth of Linux.

NO.1 he programmed the GCC, which is a free C programming language compiler that Linus Torvalds used later to build Linux operating system.

NO.2 he started GNU operating system, and build lots of important software that later been used on Linux.

NO.3 Stallman was the author of the GPL license and pioneered the concept of copyleft. GPL, General Public License, is the important open-source software license that has ever been issued. Linux was released under this license, which makes it easy for the global hackers to help Linus to build Linux with the faith that Linux would forever be free for the world to use.

End

He should be remembered because he was a hero.