Geek of the Month: Richard M. Stallman

It’s the last day of the month once again. To our avid readers, you may already know that it is time once again to honor an über geek whose works and life changed the course of technology, particularly the field of computing. So without further a do, let’s give importance to a very famous free software evangelist, the living legend himself, Richard M. Stallman.

Here is a brief summary of his fabled life.

Richard Matthew Stallman “RMS” was born on March 16, 1953). He is an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he started the free software movement and, in October 1985, set up the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

Early years
Stallman was born to Daniel Stallman and Alice Lippman in 1953 in New York City, New York. Hired by the IBM New York Scientific Center, Stallman spent the summer after his high-school graduation writing his first program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM 360.

During this time, Stallman was also a volunteer laboratory assistant in the Biology Department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in mathematics or physics, his teaching professor at Rockefeller thought he would have a future as a biologist.

In June 1971, as a first year student at Harvard University, Stallman became a programmer at the AI Laboratory of MIT. There he became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, "RMS" (which was the name of his computer accounts). In the first edition of the Hacker's Dictionary, he wrote, "'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'." Stallman graduated from Harvard magna cum laude earning a BA in Physics in 1974.

Stallman then enrolled as a graduate student in physics at MIT, but abandoned his graduate studies while remaining a programmer at the MIT AI Laboratory. At the end of his first year in the graduate program, Stallman suffered a knee injury that ended the main joy in his life - his participation in the folk dance troupe, and with it the opportunity it provided for socializing with the opposite sex. Stallman's ensuing despair culminated in social withdrawal from which he found solace in a heightened focus on the area in which his achievements made him most proud - programming. While his doctoral pursuits in physics became a casualty of this calling, however, Stallman has been awarded six honorary doctorates and two honorary professorships.

While a graduate student at MIT, Stallman published a paper on an AI truth maintenance system called dependency-directed backtracking with Gerald Jay Sussman. This paper was an early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems. As of 2003, 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 like TECO, Emacs, and the Lisp Machine Operating System. He would become an ardent critic of restricted computer access in the lab. 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 (to demonstrate that they were not increasing security, but only hindering free access to each other's software and discouraging sharing it), with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to restore this free access. Around 20% of the users followed his advice. Although Stallman boasted of the success of his campaign for many years afterward, passwords ultimately prevailed.

GNU project
Stallman announced the plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on several ARPAnet mailing lists and USENET.

In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. Stallman is the nonsalaried president of the FSF, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in Massachusetts.

In 1985, Stallman invented and popularized the concept of copyleft, a legal mechanism to protect the modification and redistribution rights for free software. It was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License, and in 1989 the first program-independent GNU General Public License (GPL) was released. By then, much of the GNU system had been completed. Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor, compiler, debugger, and a build automator. The notable exception was a kernel. In 1990, members of the GNU project began a kernel called GNU Hurd, which has yet to achieve the maturity level required for widespread usage.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, used the GNU development tools to produce the Linux kernel. This could be combined with the almost-complete GNU system to make a complete operating system. Most people use the name "Linux" to refer not only to the kernel, but also for the operating system formed by adding the Linux kernel to the GNU system. This has been a longstanding naming controversy in the free software community. Stallman argues that not using "GNU" in the name of the operating system unfairly disparages the value of the GNU project and harms the sustainability of the free software movement by breaking the link between the software and the free software philosophy of the GNU project.

Stallman's influences on hacker culture include the name POSIX and the Emacs editor. On UNIX systems, GNU Emacs's popularity rivaled that of another editor vi, spawning an editor war. Stallman's take on this was to jokingly canonize himself as "St. IGNUcius" of the Church of Emacs and acknowledge that "vi vi vi is the editor of the beast," while "using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance."

A number of developers view Stallman as being difficult to work with from a political, interpersonal, or technical standpoint. Around 1992, developers at Lucid Inc. doing their own work on Emacs clashed with Stallman and ultimately forked the software. Their fork later became XEmacs. An email archive published by Jamie Zawinski documents their criticisms and Stallman's responses. Ulrich Drepper, whom Stallman had appointed to work on GNU libc for the GNU Project, published complaints against Stallman in the release notes for glibc 2.2.4. Drepper accuses Stallman of attempting a "hostile takeover" of the project, referring to him as a "control freak and raging maniac." Eric S. Raymond, who sometimes claims to speak for parts of the open source movement, has written many pieces laying out that movement's disagreement with Stallman and the free software movement, often in terms sharply critical of Stallman.

Personal life
Stallman has devoted the bulk of his life’s energies to political and software activism. Professing to care little for material wealth, he explains that he has "always lived cheaply… like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do."

For many years, Stallman maintained no permanent residence outside his office at MIT’s CSAIL Lab, describing himself as a “squatter” on campus. His “research affiliate” position at MIT is unpaid.

In a footnote to an article he wrote in 1999, he says “As an atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said.” Stallman chooses not to celebrate Christmas, instead celebrating on December 25 a holiday of his own invention, "Grav-mass." The name and date are references to Isaac Newton, whose birthday falls on that day.

When asked about his influences, he replied that he admires Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ralph Nader, and Dennis Kucinich, and commented as well: “I admire Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, even though I criticize some of the things that they did.” Stallman is a Green Party supporter.
Stallman recommends not owning a mobile phone, as he believes the tracking of cell phones creates harmful privacy issues.

Stallman enjoys a wide range of musical styles from Conlon Nancarrow to folk; the Free Software Song takes the form of alternative words for the Bulgarian folk dance Sadi Moma. More recently he wrote a take-off on the Cuban folk song Guantanamera, about a prisoner in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and recorded it in Cuba with Cuban musicians.

Stallman is a fan of science fiction, including works by the author Greg Egan. He occasionally goes to science fiction conventions and wrote the Free Software Song while awaiting his turn to sing at a convention. He has written two science fiction stories, The Right to Read and Jinnetic Engineering.

A native English speaker, Stallman is also sufficiently fluent in French and Spanish to deliver his two-hour speeches in those languages, and claims a “somewhat flawed” command of Indonesian.

Famous Quotes:
* Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.
* People get the government their behavior deserves. People deserve better than that.
* I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
* People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.
* You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi is the text editor of the beast.
* Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents; any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.
* Prior art is as effective as US soldiers in Iraq: They control the ground they stand on, and nothing more. I used to say Vietnam, but, well, you know...
* People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.
* Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. "Don't bother us with politics," respond those who don't want to learn.
* I have not seen anyone assume that all the citizens of New York are guilty of murder, violence, robbery, perjury, or writing proprietary software.
* By the way, I hope you all know about the worldwide boycott of Coca Cola company for things like murdering union organizers in Columbia. See the site killercoke.org.
* Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance.
* When I do this, some people think that it's because I want my ego to be fed, right? Of course, I'm not asking you to call it "Stallmanix"!
* Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the US Department of Defense.
* Would a dating service on the net be ‘frowned upon’ . . . ? I hope not. But even if it is, don’t let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.
* We need to teach people to refuse to install non-free plug-ins; we need to teach people to care more about their long-term interest of freedom than their immediate desire to view a particular site.
* Based on years of conversations, I am convinced that part of the cause of the problem is the tendency to call the system Linux rather than GNU, and describe it as open source rather than free software.
* Instead of worrying about what somebody else is going to do, which is not under your control, the important thing is, what are you going to decide about what is under your control?
* "Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it."
* Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.
* Protecting essential freedoms is always a matter of restricting the actions that would deny them.
* We promote free software as an ethical and social issue. Computer users should always have the freedom to share and change the software they use. It's wrong to try to stop someone.
* Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.

Other Interesting Links:
* Personal home page
* Stallman's blog
* Essays on the GNU philosophy pages

Special Thanks to Wikipedia.org