Richard Stallman |
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Stallman, rechtlijnig individualist, heeft de gedachte
van de ‘free software’
ontwikkeld. Een concept dat o.a. door Linus
Thorvalds, de maker van Linux, is overgemomen
bij de ontwikkeling en verspreiding van Linux.
‘Free software’ werd
door Bill Gates
een ‘cancer’ genoemd en wordt door velen
inclusief MS gezien als de enige serieuze bedreiging
voor Microsoft. Momenteel is free software een geaccepteerde
manier om software te produceren door honderden bedrijven
o.a. toegepast door IBM, Sun en Novell. Vooral zich
snel ontwikkelende landen als China, India en Venezuela
stimuleren gebruik en de ontwikkeling van free software.
Richard Matthew Stallman, a.k.a.
RMS, (born March 16, 1953) is the founder of the free
software movement, the GNU project, and the Free Software
Foundation. He is also a renowned programmer, whose
major accomplishments include GNU Emacs, the GNU C
Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. He is also the author
of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL),
the most widely-used free software license, which
pioneered the concept of the copyleft.
Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his
time as a political campaigner, advocating free software
and campaigning against software idea patents and
expansions of copyright law. The time that he still
devotes to programming is spent on GNU Emacs. He supports
himself by being paid for around half of the speeches
he gives.
Stallman was born in Manhattan.
His first access to a computer came during his junior
year at high school in 1969. 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. "I first wrote it in PL/I, then
started over in assembly language when the PL/I program
was too big to fit in the computer", he later
said.
Stallman was simultaneously a volunteer Laboratory
Assistant in the Biology Department at Rockefeller
University. Although he was already moving toward
a career in mathematics or physics, his analytical
mind impressed the lab director such that a few years
after Stallman departed for college, his mother received
a phone call. "It was the professor at Rockefeller",
she recalled. "He wanted to know how Richard
was doing. He was surprised to learn that he was working
in computers. He'd always thought Richard had a great
future ahead of him as a biologist."
In 1971, as a freshman at Harvard University (graduated
with a BA in Physics in 1974), Stallman became a programmer
at the MIT AI Laboratory, where he became a fixture
in the hacker community. During these years, he was
perhaps better known by his initials, "RMS".
In the first edition of the Hacker's Dictionary, he
wrote, '"Richard Stallman" is just my mundane
name; you can call me "rms".'
more info: Wikipedia
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