Richard Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman, a.k.a. RMS, (born March 16, 1953) is the founder of the free software movement, the GNU project, and the Free Software Foundation. He is also a renowned hacker, whose major accomplishments include GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. He is also the author of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL), the most widely-used free software license, which pioneered the concept of the copyleft.

Trivia

• An aficionado of a wide range of music from Conlon Nancarrow to folk, Stallman is the author of the filky 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 and occasionally goes to conventions.
• Stallman gave POSIX its name.
• 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." http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/mcallester90truth.html
• When asked who his influences are, he has remarked that he admires 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 has done a little bit of programming in Java, but that code was written in C and Lisp.
• Stallman did not participate in the counterculture of the 60s, but found its rejection of wealth as the main goal of life inspiring.
• Stallman initially named the GNU HURD kernel "Alix" after his then-girlfriend, who managed a Unix computer facility and had told her friends "They ought to name a kernel after me."
• Stallman speaks fluent English and French, moderately fluent Spanish, and flawed Indonesian. He has studied Latin, Chinese, Hungarian, and Navajo, but did not reach the point of being able to speak them. He feels he has mastered a language when he can make puns in it. http://stallman.org/spanish_puns.html

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• In 2004, having been asked, he endorsed Hugo Chavez, recommending people to vote No in the Venezuelan recall referendum, 2004
• The movie documentary Revolution OS features interviews with Stallman.
• He has been the subject, or some would say the instigator, of a number of widely-publicized flamewars. Although occasionally for technical reasons (Tcl vs. Scheme), most of these flamewars have revolved around the use of non-free software.
• Stallman founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989 to fight software patents and interface copyright. The League never gained the momentum Stallman hoped for, and has become dormant.
• In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free on-line encyclopedia through the means of inviting the public to contribute articles. http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html
• Stallman cannot swim.
• Although he is a great lover of cut flowers, he is known to be afraid of living plants.