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Richard Stallman Bio, Age, Wife, Quotes, Laptop, Website and Free Software.

RICHARD STALLMAN

Richard Stallman Biography

Richard Stallman is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute and modify that software.

Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License.

Richard Stallman’s photo

Richard Stallman Age

Richard was born in the year 1953 March 16th, he is already 66 years 2 months old as per today 2019 May 10th. Details about his height, weight and body measurements shall be updated soon.

Richard Stallman Family/Life

Stallman was born March 16, 1953, in New York City, to a family of Jewish heritage. His parents are Alice Lippman, a school teacher, and Daniel Stallman, a printing press broker. Stallman had a difficult relationship with his parents, as his father had a drinking habit and verbally abused his stepmother.

He later came to describe his parents as “tyrants”. He was interested in computers at a young age; when Stallman was a pre-teen at a summer camp, he read manuals for the IBM 7094. From 1967 to 1969, Stallman attended a Columbia University Saturday program for high school students.

Stallman was also a volunteer laboratory assistant in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was interested in mathematics and physics, his teaching professor at Rockefeller thought he showed promise as a biologist

Richard Stallman Wife/Married

Is Richard Stallman married?

Stallman has never been married, to the best of anyone’s knowledge.

In 2013, I was discussing Stallman’s love life with a friend. While I deeply admire Stallman for his intelligence, passion, and contributions to free software, I argued that, due to unfortunate realities, there are probably very few women who find him attractive, and that’s probably why he’s single.

My friend disagreed with my position and argued that there are probably many women who have a romantic interest in Stallman, but he turned them down because they weren’t as passionate about free software as he is.

So I decided to email Stallman and ask him basically that, though not in those words.

Stallman’s reply didn’t really resolve the question, but I nevertheless appreciated that he took the time to reply. He said that he “only occasionally” had the chance to meet a special someone, though he didn’t elaborate on whether that’s because most women don’t find him attractive, or because his career in free software advocacy leaves him with little time for socializing—and I thought it would be rude to press the question.

He also said that he would not reject a woman “just because free software was not her main concern in life”.

So hey, if you’re interested in a date, you should consider emailing him. I am sure he would appreciate the directness.

Richard Stallman Career

His first experience with actual computers was at the IBM New York Scientific Center when he was in high school. He was hired for the summer in 1970, following his senior year of high school, to write a numerical analysis program in Fortran.

He completed the task after a couple of weeks (“I swore that I would never use FORTRAN again because I despised it as a language compared with other languages”) and spent the rest of the summer writing a text editor in APL and a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM System/360.

Harvard University and MIT

As a first-year student at Harvard University in fall 1970, Stallman was known for his strong performance in Math 55. He was happy: “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 at Harvard, he became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, RMS (which he used in his computer accounts). Stallman received a bachelor’s degree in physics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1974.

Stallman considered staying on at Harvard, but instead, he decided to enrol as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He pursued a doctorate in physics for one year but left that program to focus on his programming at the MIT AI Laboratory.

While working (starting in 1975) as a research assistant at MIT under Gerry Sussman, Stallman published a paper (with Sussman) in 1977 on an AI truth maintenance system, called dependency-directed backtracking. This paper was an early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems.

As of 2009, the technique Stallman and Sussman introduced is still the most general and powerful form of intelligent backtracking. The technique of constraint recording, wherein partial results of a search are recorded for later reuse, was also introduced in this paper.

As a hacker in MIT’s AI laboratory, Stallman worked on software projects such as TECO, Emacs for ITS, and the Lisp machine operating system. He would become an ardent critic of restricted computer access in the lab, which at that time was funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

When MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password, with a suggestion to change it to the empty string instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems.

Around 20 per cent of the users followed his advice at the time, although passwords ultimately prevailed. Stallman boasted of the success of his campaign for many years afterwards.

Richard Stallman Laptop

I use a Thinkpad T400s computer, which has a free initialization program and a free operating system (Trisquel GNU/Linux). It was not sold that way by Lenovo, however; small businesses buy them used, recondition them, and install the free software. This is one of the computers endorsed by the FSF.

Richard Stallman Quotes

1. “When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.”

2. “I don’t have a problem with someone using their talents to become successful, I just don’t think the highest calling is a success. Things like freedom and the expansion of knowledge are beyond success, beyond the personal. Personal success is not wrong, but it is limited in importance, and once you have enough of it it is a shame to keep striving for that, instead of for truth, beauty, or justice.”

3 “With software there are only two possibilities: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.”

4. “People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don’t accept the world.”

Richard Stallman Memes

Richard Stallman Website

This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman. https://stallman.org/

Richard Stallman Honors and Awards

1. 1986: Honorary lifetime membership of the Chalmers University of Technology Computer Society.
2. 1990: Exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship (“genius grant”).
3. 1990: The Association for Computing Machinery’s Grace Murray Hopper Award “For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)”.
4. 1996: Honorary doctorate from Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology.

5. 1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award.

6. Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award.
7. 2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being.
8. 2001: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow.
9. 2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership.
10. 2003: Honorary doctorate, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

11. 2004: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Nacional de Salta.
12. 2004: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú.
13. 2007: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega [es].
14. 2007: First Premio Internacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre.
15. 2007: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote.

16. 2007: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Pavia.
17. 2008: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru.
18. 2009: Honorary doctorate, from Lakehead University.
19. 2011: Honorary doctorate, from National University of Córdoba.
20. 2012: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad César Vallejo de Trujillo, in Peru.

21. 2012: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Latinoamericana Cima de Tacna, in Peru.
22. 2012: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad José Faustino Sánchez Carrió, in Peru.
23. 2014: Honorary doctorate, from Concordia University, in Montréal.
24. 2015: ACM Software System Award “For the development and leadership of GCC”[118]

25. 2016: Honorary doctorate, from Pierre and Marie Curie University[137]
26. 2016: Social Medicine award, from GNU Solidario

Richard Stallman Free Software

The Free Software Foundation Management

Richard is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project’s leader ever since. With that announcement, Richard also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

Since the mid-1990s, Richard has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws.

Before that, Richard developed a number of widely used software components of GNU, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Richard pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

Richard graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975. He also developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project.

Richard Stallman Open Source

Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

The terms “free software” and “open source” stand for almost the same range of programs. However, they say deeply different things about those programs, based on different values. The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice.

By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles. This is why we do not agree with open source and do not use that term.

When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”

These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users’ sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in general.

Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the public schools of some regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system.

Most of these users, however, have never heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community, because nowadays this system and community are more often spoken of as “open source”, attributing them to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.

The free software movement has campaigned for computer users’ freedom since 1983. In 1984 we launched the development of the free operating system GNU so that we could avoid the nonfree operating systems that deny freedom to their users.

During the 1980s, we developed most of the essential components of the system and designed the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) to release them under—a license designed specifically to protect freedom for all users of a program.

Not all of the users and developers of free software agreed with the goals of the free software movement. In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of “open source.” The term was originally proposed to avoid a possible misunderstanding of the term “free software,” but it soon became associated with philosophical views quite different from those of the free software movement.

Some of the supporters of open source considered the term a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by highlighting the software’s practical benefits, while not raising issues of right and wrong that they might not like to hear.

Other supporters flatly rejected the free software movement’s ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for open source, they neither cited nor advocated those values. The term “open source” quickly became associated with ideas and arguments based only on practical values, such as making or having powerful, reliable software.

Most of the supporters of open source have come to it since then, and they make the same association. Most discussion of “open source” pays no attention to right and wrong, only to popularity and success; here’s a typical example. A minority of supporters of open source do nowadays say freedom is part of the issue, but they are not very visible among the many that don’t.

The two now describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users’ freedom.

By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand.

For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.

“Free software.” “Open source.” If it’s the same software (or nearly so), does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak of “free software.”

We in the free software movement don’t think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters.

Richard Stallman Linux

Linux for the GNU Project

Stallman asks that the term GNU/Linux, be used to refer to the operating system created by combining the GNU system and the kernel Linux. Stallman refers to this operating system as “a variant of GNU, and the GNU Project is its principal developer”

He claims that the connection between the GNU project’s philosophy and its software is broken when people refer to the combination as merely Linux. Starting around 2003, he began also using the term GNU+Linux, to prevent others from pronouncing the phrase GNU/Linux as /ɡnuː ˈlɪnəks/ GNOO LIN-əks, which would erroneously imply that the kernel Linux is maintained by the GNU project.

The creator of Linux Linus Torvalds has publicly stated that he objects to modification of the name and that the rename “is their[the FSF] confusion not ours”

Richard Stallman Free Software Song

Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds is back at Linux while GNU’s Stallman unveils a “kindness” policy

Linus Torvalds is apparently back at the helm of the Linux operating system he created in the early 1990s, after taking roughly a month off after complaints about his brusque, often vulgar communications style.

“The fact that I then misread people and don’t realize (for years) how badly I’ve judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good,” he wrote in a public September 16 email to a Linux kernel developer list, just days before a New Yorker article highlighted how his style turned away women from contributing to the popular operating system.

In announcing version 4.19 of the software on Monday, Linux temporary leader Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote “Linus, I’m handing the kernel tree back to you” and called for the Linux community to be both more welcoming and more united. He codenamed the version “People’s Front” in a reference to ineffectively divided activist groups in the satirical Monty Python movie Life of Brian.

“Don’t fall into the cycle of arguing about those ‘others’ in the ‘Judean People’s Front’ when we are the ‘We’re the People’s Front of Judea!’” he wrote. “That is the trap that countless communities have fallen into over the centuries.”

Also on Monday, Richard Stallman, head of the GNU Project that contributes free software widely used with Linux and other operating systems, announced a new set of Kind Communications Guidelines for the project.

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