Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman is an American programmer and free-software activist who founded the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation. His advocacy helped establish software freedom as a distinct political and ethical movement.

GNU Project: A project launched in 1983 to create a Unix-compatible operating system composed entirely of free software. Stallman founded it to build a system users could run, study, modify, and share.
Unix: A family of operating systems developed at Bell Labs beginning in the late 1960s. GNU aimed to recreate Unix’s useful design while making every component free software.
Linus Torvalds: A Finnish-American software engineer who created the Linux kernel in 1991. Combining Torvalds’s kernel with GNU components produced the system often called GNU/Linux.
Open-source movement: A movement that promotes source-code access and collaborative software development, often on practical grounds. Stallman rejected its narrower framing when it displaced the ethical case for user freedom.
MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: A research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology established in 1959 to study artificial intelligence. Stallman worked there as a programmer before founding GNU.
GNU General Public License: A free-software license that grants users broad freedoms and requires derivative works to preserve those freedoms. Stallman’s copyleft license made sharing modified GNU software part of its legal terms.
Source code: Human-readable instructions that programmers write and translate into executable programs. Access to source code is necessary for studying and modifying software, freedoms Stallman championed.
Richard M. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation: A nonprofit organization founded in 1985 to promote computer users’ freedom and support free software. Stallman created this organization and led its early work.
Proprietary software: Software whose license restricts users’ rights to inspect, modify, copy, or redistribute it. Stallman’s activism directly challenges restrictions that deny users control over software.
MIT hacker culture: A collaborative computing culture at MIT in which programmers freely shared and modified code. Its norms shaped Stallman’s expectations of software sharing and influenced his response to their decline.

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