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Richard Stallman

Also known as Richard Matthew Stallman, Richard M. Stallman, R. Stallman, rms, St. IGNUcius, Chief GNUisance

American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

AI overview

Richard Stallman is an American computer programmer and software freedom activist who founded the GNU project, which aims to create free software alternatives to commercial programs. His work matters because he pioneered the concept of "free software" as a movement for user rights and transparency in computing, influencing how millions of people think about software ownership and access today.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

In the Vinony graph

Richard Stallman is indexed among the 9,861 entries in Vinony's American Academy of Arts & Sciences collection.

Within Vinony's link graph, Richard Stallman is referenced by 993 other articles, and connects out to MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, GNU General Public License and Common Lisp.

It sits within the topics 1953 births, Activists from New York City and American artificial intelligence researchers.

Its subject is documented across 107 Wikipedia language editions.

Person · Open Library

Born: 16 March 1956
Works: 40

Top works

Libres enfants du savoir numérique
Texinfo
GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual
Debugging With Gdb, V.4.16
The GNU C Library Reference Manual for Version 1.09 Beta

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: United States
Active from: 1953-03-16

Official site Discogs

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 1,415
Total plays: 13,174

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

The Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data
· 1977 · cited 63,333x
The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools
· 2009 · cited 59,223x
Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows–Wheeler transform
· 2009 · cited 47,643x
ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database
· 2009 · cited 47,248x
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
· 2021 · cited 43,565x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“Well, Geoff forwarded me a copy of the DEC message, and I eat my words. I sure would have minded it! Nobody should be allowed to send a message with a header that long, no matter what it is about.”
“What they had in common was mainly love of excellence and programming. They wanted to make their programs that they used be as good as they could. They also wanted to make them do neat things. They wanted to be able to do something in a more exciting way than anyone believed possible and show "Look how wonderful this is. I bet you didn't believe this could be done."”
“GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.”
“To avoid horrible confusion, please pronounce the G in the word GNU when it is the name of this project.”
“GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.”
“Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Wikidata facts

Official website: stallman.org
Image: Richard Stallman by Anders Brenna 01.jpg

Show 11 more facts

Commons category: Richard Stallman
date of birth: 1953-03-16
pseudonym: Saint IGNUcius
Commons gallery: Richard Stallman
Commons Creator page: Richard Stallman
social media followers: 3952
public key fingerprint: 6781 9B34 3B2A B70D ED93 2087 2C64 64AF 2A8E 4C02
email address: mailto:[email protected]
name in native language: Richard Matthew Stallman
birth name: Richard Matthew Stallman
short name: RMS

Sources (10)

via Wikidata · CC0

~36 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Richard Matthew Stallman (/ˈstɔːlmən/ STAWL-mən; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software which ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU C Compiler and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.

Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to write a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. With that he also launched the free software movement. He has been GNU Project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including among others, the GNU C Compiler (GCC) version 1.0 (that later was expanded and renamed GNU Compiler Collection), GNU Debugger, and GNU Emacs text editor.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Richard Stallman” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.