Textbook of Linux

b. 1953, New York City — Founder of GNU and the FSF; author of GCC, Emacs, the GPL

Also known as: Stallman, RMS

Richard Matthew Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1983 at MIT, with the explicit goal of producing a complete Unix-like operating system made entirely of free software. In the decade that followed he wrote (or heavily shaped) some of the most-used programs on any Unix system today: the GNU Emacs editor, the GCC compiler, the GNU Debugger, and many of the coreutils.

Stallman's most far-reaching contribution may be the GNU General Public License, the first widely adopted "copyleft" licence. Copyleft uses copyright law to require that modifications to a program remain under the same free terms — so once code is released, it cannot be re-enclosed. The kernel Linus Torvalds released in 1991 was placed under the GPL, and the combination of GNU userland plus the Linux kernel produced the first practical, fully free operating system.

Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to steward GNU and argue, often uncompromisingly, for the rights of software users. He insists on the term "GNU/Linux" for systems that combine the two. After resigning from MIT and the FSF in 2019 following controversy over remarks about a colleague of Jeffrey Epstein, he returned to the FSF board in 2021, a decision that remains divisive within the free-software community.