Richard Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman ( STAWL-mən; born March 16, 1953), often called rms, is an American programmer and activist for the free software movement. He advocates that software should be distributed in a way that gives users the freedom to run, examine, share, and change it. Software that guarantees these freedoms is called free software. In September 1983, Stallman started the GNU Project with the goal of creating a Unix-like operating system made entirely of free software, and in October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF). He invented the idea of copyleft, which uses copyright law to protect the rights to use, modify, and share free software, and he is the primary author of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most commonly used free software license.

Stallman has been the lead architect and organizer of the GNU Project, and he created several widely used GNU programs, including the GNU C Compiler (later expanded into the GNU Compiler Collection), the GNU Debugger, and the GNU Emacs text editor. In 1989, he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. From the mid-1990s onward, he has focused on advocating for free software and campaigning against software patents, digital rights management (which he calls "digital restrictions management"), software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, hardware dongles, copy protection, proprietary formats, and closed-source binary executables.

In September 2019, Stallman resigned as president of the FSF and left his visiting scientist role at MIT after making controversial comments about the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal, specifically regarding Marvin Minsky. He remained head of the GNU Project, and in 2021 he returned to the FSF board of directors. Stallman has said that calling Epstein a "sex offender" minimizes his crimes and proposed calling him a "serial rapist" instead.

Stallman was born on March 16, 1953, in New York City, to a Jewish family. He had a difficult relationship with his parents and felt he lacked a proper home. He became interested in computers early; as a pre-teen at summer camp, he read manuals for the IBM 7094. From 1967 to 1969, he attended a Columbia University Saturday program for high school students and volunteered as a lab assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Though he was interested in math and physics, his supervising professor there thought he had promise as a biologist. His first hands-on experience with computers came at the IBM New York Scientific Center in high school. After his senior year, in the summer of 1970, he was hired to write a numerical analysis program in Fortran. He finished it in a couple of weeks—and swore never to use Fortran again—then spent the rest of the summer writing a text editor in APL and a preprocessor for PL/I on the IBM System/360.

In fall 1970, as a first-year student at Harvard University, Stallman was known for his strong performance in Math 55. He felt happy, saying, "For the first time in my life, I felt I had found a home at Harvard." In 1971, near the end of his first year, he became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and joined the hacker community, where he was usually called by his initials, RMS. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1974. He considered staying at Harvard but instead enrolled as a graduate student at MIT, pursuing a doctorate in physics for one year before leaving to focus on programming at the MIT AI Lab. Starting in 1975, he worked as a research assistant under Gerry Sussman, and in 1977 they published a paper on an AI truth maintenance system called dependency-directed backtracking. This paper was an early work on intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems; as of 2009, the technique they introduced remained the most general and powerful form of intelligent backtracking. The paper also introduced constraint recording, where partial search results are stored for later reuse.

At the MIT AI Lab, Stallman worked on software projects such as TECO and Emacs for the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), and on the Lisp machine operating system (the CONS from 1974–1976 and the CADR from 1977–1979, which was later commercialized by Symbolics and Lisp Machines, Inc. around 1980). He became a strong critic of restricted computer access in the lab, which was then funded mainly by DARPA. When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages with their decoded passwords, suggesting they change them to an empty string (no password) to restore anonymous access. About 20 percent of users followed his advice, though passwords eventually prevailed. Stallman boasted of the success of this campaign for many years.