Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman the American software developer and activist (born 1953) who founded the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation and who defined the four freedoms that characterize free software. A programmer of great technical ability, he became the leading theorist and campaigner of the movement that holds that users should have the right to run, study, modify and share the software they use.

Early Life and Education

Richard Matthew Stallman was born on 16 March 1953 in New York City and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was a precocious student with a strong interest in mathematics and science, and he spent time as a volunteer at Columbia University and later worked at the IBM research centre in New York. He enrolled at Harvard University in 1970 and graduated in physics in 1974, though his deepest interest was in programming.

While at Harvard he took a position at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined a community of programmers who shared their code freely and worked on innovative symbolic and robotic systems. He remained at MIT for many years, first as a programmer and later as a researcher, and the culture of that laboratory, in which software was a common resource, shaped his lifelong convictions about the ethics of computing.

The GNU Project and Free Software

In the early 1980s the culture of sharing at the laboratory broke down as companies began to claim ownership of software and to restrict its use. When a printer driver was withheld from the lab, Stallman concluded that proprietary software was a social problem. In 1983 he announced the GNU project, an ambitious effort to build a complete operating system that would be free in the sense that its users could freely use, study, modify and redistribute it.

He wrote a manifesto setting out the philosophy and began producing the tools the system needed, including an editor called Emacs, a compiler collection, and a debugger, many of which he wrote himself. To give the project a legal and organizational basis he founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 and developed the GNU General Public License, a novel legal instrument that used copyright law to guarantee the freedoms of users, a technique he called copyleft.

The Four Freedoms and the Licence

Stallman articulated the definition of free software in terms of four freedoms: the freedom to run a program for any purpose, the freedom to study how it works and adapt it, the freedom to redistribute copies, and the freedom to improve it and release the improvements for the benefit of the community. He insisted that free meant freedom of the users, not price, and he distinguished carefully between free and open-source software, arguing that the former was a matter of ethics rather than merely of development efficiency.

The GNU General Public License, and its later versions, became the most widely used free software licence. Its central innovation was to require that derivative works also be free, preventing the code from being absorbed into proprietary products. This reciprocal obligation, known as copyleft, built a growing commons of software that could not be privatized, and it gave the movement a durable legal foundation.

GNU, Linux and the Free Software Ecosystem

By the early 1990s the GNU project had produced most of the components of an operating system but lacked a finished kernel. When Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel under the GPL, the two efforts combined to form a complete free system, commonly called GNU/Linux, whose naming Stallman still insists upon. He has argued that the role of the GNU project in making the system possible should not be forgotten in accounts that credit only the kernel.

Through the Free Software Foundation he supported the development of many other programs and campaigns, including the GNU Compiler Collection and the GPL itself, and he campaigned against practices he regarded as threats to user freedom such as software patents, digital restrictions management, and proprietary extensions to open standards. He travelled widely to lecture on free software and to build a global community around its principles.

Influence and Legacy

Stallman's ideas gave the free software movement its philosophy, its vocabulary and its legal tools, and they influenced the wider open-source movement that grew up alongside it. The GNU General Public License governed much of the software that runs the internet, and the four freedoms became a reference point in debates over copyright, patents and digital rights. He received a MacArthur Fellowship and many other honours for his work.

He is a controversial figure as well as an influential one, known for uncompromising positions and for a personal manner that has sometimes alienated allies; he resigned from positions at MIT and the Free Software Foundation in 2019 after controversy over his remarks, though he later returned to the foundation's board. Whatever the disputes, his central claim, that software users have rights that licenses should protect, reshaped how the world thinks about computing.

See also

• GNU Project
• Free Software Foundation
• GNU General Public License
• Copyleft