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Richard Stallman

American activist and programmer (born 1953)

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Richard Stallman at the University of Bologna, Italy, after his conference Software libre and freedom in the digital society and taking off his mask.
Patafisik · CC BY-SA 4.0

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Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to write a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. With that he also launched the free software movement. He has been GNU Project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including among others, the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Debugger, and GNU Emacs.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify, and distribute free software. He 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.

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 (which he refers to as digital restrictions management), software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, software protection dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats, and closed-source binary executables.

In September 2019, Stallman resigned as president of the FSF and left his visiting scientist role at MIT after making controversial comments about the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal related to Marvin Minsky. He remained head of the GNU Project, and in 2021 returned to the FSF board of directors and others.

Early life

Stallman was born March 16, 1953 in New York City, to a family of Jewish heritage. He had a troublesome relationship with his parents and did not feel he had a proper home. He was interested in computers at a young age; when he was a pre-teen at a summer camp, he read manuals for the IBM 7094. From 1967 to 1969, Stallman attended a Columbia University Saturday program for high school students. He was also a volunteer laboratory assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was interested in mathematics and physics, his supervising professor at Rockefeller thought he showed promise as a biologist.

His first experience with actual computers was at the IBM New York Scientific Center when he was in high school. He was hired for the summer in 1970 after his senior year of high school, to write a numerical analysis program in Fortran. He completed the task after a couple of weeks ("I swore that I would never use FORTRAN again because I despised it as a language compared with other languages") and spent the rest of the summer writing a text editor in APL and a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM System/360.

Harvard University and MIT

As a first-year student at Harvard University in fall 1970, Stallman was known for his strong performance in Math 55. He was happy, "For the first time in my life, I felt I had found a home at Harvard."

In 1971, near the end of his first year at Harvard, he became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, RMS, which he used in his computer accounts. Stallman received a bachelor's degree in physics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1974. He considered staying on at Harvard, but instead decided to enroll as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He pursued a doctorate in physics for one year, but left the program to focus on his programming at the MIT AI Laboratory.

While working (starting in 1975) as a research assistant at MIT under Gerry Sussman, Stallman published a paper (with Sussman) in 1977 on an AI truth maintenance system, called dependency-directed backtracking. The paper was an early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems. As of 2009, the technique Stallman and Sussman introduced was still the most general and powerful form of intelligent backtracking. The technique of constraint recording, wherein partial results of a search are recorded for later reuse, was also introduced in this paper.

As a hacker in MIT's AI laboratory, Stallman worked on software projects like TECO and Emacs for the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), as well as the Lisp machine operating system (the CONS of 1974–1976 and the CADR of 1977–1979—this latter unit was commercialized by Symbolics and Lisp Machines, Inc. (LMI) starting around 1980). He became an ardent critic of restricted computer access in the lab, which at that time was funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password, with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems. Around 20 percent of the users followed his advice at the time, although passwords ultimately prevailed. Stallman boasted of the success of his campaign for many years afterward.

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