Richard Stallman with a toy gnu, the symbol of the GNU project
Richard Stallman
Free Software Pioneer
Key events in Richard Stallman's life (as of 2016)
- Born in 1953 in New York City
- Enrolled at Harvard University in 1970 and became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Graduated with a degree in Physics and started the graduate progamme in Physics at MIT which he ended after one year in favour of his work at the AI lab here he became a critic of restricions on computer access
- Announced the GNU project in 1983 to create a free operating system and left MIT in 1984 to work full-time on the project
- Wrote the GNU General Public License in 1989 to guarantee end users the freedoms to use, study, copy, modify, redistribute their software
- Became an outspoken and widely travelled advocate of free software and opponent of copyright and surveillance
Software Projects initiated by Stallman
- GNU Emacs, first public release in 1985
- GNU Debugger, 1986
- GNU Compiler Collection (initially, the GNU C Compiler), 1987
- GNU Make (co-author with Roland McGrath), 1988
“Free software is a political movement; open source is a development model.”
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