Richard Stallman (born March, 16 1953, New York City) is a world famous programmer. He is the author of such programs as GNU Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and GNU Debugger. Stallman is also considered the founder of free software, GNU project, Free Software Foundation and League for Programming Freedom.
During his years of studies at Harvard University, Richard Stallman worked as a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. After graduating from Harvard University, Stallman became a student at MIT. Soon he refused from his plans to continue his scientific education. In 1984 Stallman gave up working at the Laboratory, to set to work on GNU project, which was founded by him in September, 1983. Beginning with the middle of 1990’s, Richard Stallman developed less software, as he devoted his time to the developing of free software concepts.
Stallman is the author of a great number of essays written on software freedom. He has regularly made speeches which are entitled “The GNU project and the Free Software Movement”, “The Dangers of Software Patents”, and “Copyright and Community in the age of Computer Networks”. In 1999 Stallman suggested developing a free on-line encyclopedia, by inviting people to contribute articles.
Over the time of many years, Richard Stallman has supported the exactness of his terminology. Stallman does not accept the term “open source software” because it does not render the value of the software such as freedom. He asks people to use the term “free software”, because of the freedom issues of this software. He also affirms that one has to say “proprietary software” instead of “closed source software”, in the event if, the software can not be distributed, used or modified freely. It is noteworthy that Richard Stallman takes the terminology most seriously. For instance, he agrees to give interview only to those journalists who will use his terminology in the article.
