Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman , AKA RMS, is the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project. He is also the author of the GPL.
Reading
- Richard Stallman Answers Your Questions slashdot, 2013-01-17
- Free as in Freedom (PDF ), Sam Williams, 2002-03: Available online in its entirety
- My Lisp Experiences and the Development of GNU Emacs , Richard Stallman, 2002
- Richard Stallman on the Hacker Spirit at MIT , Glyn Moody, 2013-09-30
- Richard Stallman on the Painful Birth of GNU , Glyn Moody, 2013-10-02
- Open And Shut , by Richard Poynder 2006-03-21
Video
- How to Learn to Program
- in which RMS does an uncannily good impression of gwlester
Description
Stallman wrote Emacs, GCC, and numerous other free programs. While at the MIT AI Lab, he famously single-handedly cloned the output of the entire Symbolics programming team, making his work directly available to Symbolics' competitor, Lisp Machines Incorporated. This was in response to Symbolics' decision to stop sharing their source code with the AI Lab. "I was going to punish Symbolics if it was the last thing I did," Stallman said . Another formative event was the sale of Gosling Emacs by James Gosling to UniPress, who then successfully forced Stallman to stop distributing the Gosling source code that Stallman had previously received permission to incorporate into Emacs. Stallman's response to this turn of events was the GPL.
Stallman has been claimed to be aggressive towards competing projects. Jamie Zawinski complained that he unfairly stifled news of Lucid Emacs , and Cédric Beust wrote a critique describing Stallman's leadership failure at the time. Ulrich Drepper accused Stallman of attempting a hostile takeover of glibc . He insists that most Linux distributions should be called GNU/Linux .
RMS and Tcl
In 1994, when he was promoting Guile, Stallman posted a diatribe against Tcl to comp.lang.tcl. At the 1999 LinuxWorld Convention and Expo, Stallman called John Ousterhout a parasite on the free software community .
Trivia
- RMS was a vocal critic of the mouse
In spite to the free-love nature of the GPL, and contrary to his own outer appearance, Stallman wasn't a hippie:
- "The world is a certain way. They wanted to believe in a fairy-tale. But at the time, there was a nice thing about them. which is that they wanted people to love each other and not hurt each other, which I thought was a good thing. But all told, I couldn’t be part of that. I didn’t want to get involved with the use of drugs, which I thought of as scary and dangerous and foolish. And clearly, they had no idea of caution. They were taking crazy risks because they didn’t understand that they could be hurt. I’d read that-supposedly–young people don’t believe they can die. Well, that never happened to me. I can’t understand how anyone can not believe that he can die." ref
Good Clean Fun
- Speaking Engagement Info Packet
- in which Stallman empathizes with the plight of parrots
- Stallman is looking for love
- Soulja Boy Dance, MIT Style
- "Giving the Linus Torvalds award to the Free Software Foundation is sort of like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Fleet"
