Richard Stallman

The best presentation for Richard Stallman is undoubtedly his own biography, appeared in the first edition of the "Hacker's Dictionary": I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953, and moved to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. My hobbies include affection, international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, recorder, puns, science fiction fandom, and programming; I magically get paid for doing the last one. About a year ago i split up with the PDP-10 computer to which i was married for ten years. We still love each other, but the world is taking us in different directions. For the moment I still live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among our old memories. "Richard Stallman" is just my mundane name; you can call me "rms". He is, perhaps, the best know Hacker involved in political activism in defense of software user's freedoms around the whole world. The operating system widely know as Linux was indeed an old idea of him: to get a totally free, complete and competitive computing system to bring three basic liberties to the users: 0. Freedom of use for whatever you want. 1. Freedom to study the code. 2. Freedom of (re)distribution. 3. And the most important: Freedom for modifying the source code to suit your specific needs or fixing it. That's the hymn sang by RMS in one of the most famous and awful Hacker songs ever written: the Free Software Song: "Join us now and share the software; You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free [...] Hoarders may get piles of money, That is true, hackers, that is true. But they cannot help their neighbors; That's not good, hackers, that's not good [...]" with a Bulgarian Music rhythm of 7/8 !! (here is the story of its writing) The scarce musical production of RMS (2 known tracks) looks like an obvious result of his political activism and trips around the world. The "other" track Guantanamero is sang in Spanish, given that it is an old revolutionary Cuban song telling the disgraces of the oppressed people is a very good way of promoting free software and freethinking. RMS is also known for supporting the F.S.F (Free Software Foundation) bringing the Word of St. IGNUcius, a comic character that he plays at some conferences meaning the "Pureness of Spirit" of all the GNU/Linux Hackers and supporters . see: Church Of EMACS His controversial and strong political beliefs made blow sparks between him, the well known Hacker Linus Torvalds and the not so known Eric Raymond who attacked RMS points of view repeatedly. RMS: Linux, the kernel, is often thought of as the flagship of free software, yet its current version is partially non-free. How did this happen? This problem, like the decision to use Bitkeeper, reflects the attitude of the original developer of Linux, a person who thinks that “technically better” is more important than freedom. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/linux-gnu-freedom.html Enjoy his free musical production. ___________________________________________ More information about the GNU movement, the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman at: http://www.gnu.org http://www.fsf.org http://stallman.org/ If you are reading this page you probably don't need such long explanations.