Richard Stallman - Digital Dissent

Richard Stallman is the founder Free Software Foundation as well as the Gnu Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for "GNU's Not Unix''), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small.

Mr. Stallman 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. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project.

Mr. Stallman received the Grace Hopper award for 1991 from the Association for Computing Machinery, for his development of the first Emacs editor. In 1990 he was awarded a Macarthur foundation fellowship, and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the royal institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's pioneer award along with Linus Torvalds. In 1999 he received the Yuri Rubinski award. In 2001 he received a second honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow, and shared the Takeda award for social/economic betterment with Torvalds and Ken Sakamura. In 2002 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Richard Stallman's excellent new book "Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman" can be purchased on the Free Software Foundation's secure website.

These and many more essays can be found at the GNU/FSF website and I highly encourage that you go there and read more!

Richard Stallman "Free Software Definition"

Richard Stallman "The GNU Manifesto

Richard Stallman "Can You Trust Your Computer?"