Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often shortened to rms, is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. He campaigns for the freedom to use, study, distribute and modify software; software that ensures these freedoms legally (via its license) is termed free software. Stallman opposes proprietary software which takes away a user's rights to exercise these freedoms through restrictive software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats and binary executables without source code and thus forces its users into a role of dependence on a company that seeks to control and monopolize the users and the market via these restrictions.
In September 1983, Stallman launched the GNU Project to create a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. He has been the GNU project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, various tools in the GNU Core Utilities and the original Emacs editor.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law as a contract to preserve the right to use, modify and distribute free software, and is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license.
With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement; in October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation. In 1989 he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom.
Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management, and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws.Continue Reading »
