Richard Stallman

FreeSoftware activist, founder of the GnuProject, and author of a huge number of free tools: GnuEmacs, GNU compiler (gcc), and debugger (gdb), etc...

Personal homepage: http://stallman.org

Not a member of the SoftwareConspiracy

Subject of the recent biography "FreeAsInFreedom".

This interview with PigDogJournal? will give you something of the style, substance and substrate of the man: http://www.pigdog.org/interview_with_stallman.html

He is also thought by some to have CarpalTunnelSyndrome.

Also known as RMS, he is a ThreeLetterPerson.

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A new interview (5/1/2000) with the man appears here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/01/1052216&mode=thread

On Monday, April 17th, we requested questions for Richard M. Stallman. Here, at last, are his answers. Warning: The interview below contains mature concepts and strong opinions. It may not be suitable reading for easily-angered readers whose views conflict with Mr Stallman's.

Personal comment about the Warning above: Bring me a man who does not anger anyone, who does not bring forward discussion and controversy, and I will show you the Master's pet that he is.

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Some excerpts from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html (1986):

• See "JamesGosling"
• http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?IncompatibleTimesharingSystem
• http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?HackingAtNight
• http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SelfSufficiency
• http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?EatSushi

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RichardStallman is not just an altruistic hacker trying to change the world of software development; he is an argumentative politician who is not afraid of provoking, upsetting and bugging people who don't agree with him. In spite of what you could assume intuitively, RMS even goes so far as to heatedly criticize OpenSourceSoftware developers that use less restrictive licences than the GeneralPublicLicense (i.e. give away their work with minimal restrictions, but don't propagate FreeSoftware ideology).

As an unsurprising consequence, RMS is a very controversial character and subject of frequent emotional discussions/FlameWars. It is in fact hard to collaboratively write up objective information about him without being interrupted by zealous fans on one side ("RMS is a genius!") and passionate critics on the other side ("RMS is dumb as a brick!").

[much heated ThreadMode discussion moved to RichardStallmanDiscussion]

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CategoryPerson