Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often known by his initials, rms, is a software freedom activist and computer programmer.

1. Richard
Matthew
Stallman
The Father Of
Free Software

2. Early Life and Education
Richard Matthew Stallman was born in Manhattan, New York,on born March 16,
1953. He first accessed a computer during his senior year at high school in 1969.
He was hired by IBM New York Scientific Centre, while he was still in high-school.
He wrote his first program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on
the IBM 360.
In June 1971, as a first year student at Harvard University, Stallman became a pro-
grammer at the AI Laboratory of MIT.
Stallman graduated from Harvard earning a BA in Physics in 1974. He then en-
rolled at MIT as a graduate student, but abandoned his pursuit of a graduate
degree while remaining a programmer at the MIT AI Laboratory.
In 1977, Stallman published a paper on an AI truth maintenance system called de-
pendency-directed backtracking.

3. Contributions
GNU Project – Free Software Foundation
In 1983 he started GNU project and in January 1984, Stall-
man quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU proj-
ect, he founded the GNU Project to create a free unix-like
operating system, and has been the project's lead archi-
tect and organizer.
He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in
1989 to unite free software developers as well as develop-
ers of proprietary software to fight against software pat-
ents and the extension of the scope of copyright.
He also introduced the concept of copyleft to protect the
ideals of this movement, and enshrined this concept in
the widely-used GPL (General Public License) for software,
the most widely used free software license.

4. Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded by Rich-
ard Stallman on 4 October 1985, targeted towards the
growth of new free generation of users as our life every
day gives us more reasons to use different software.
Interesting fact that free software foundation itself uses
only free software for their work, as it is their life’s princi-
ple.
Every year thousands of corporations and individual soft-
ware developers register their copyrights with enforcing
the license and the US copyright office through Compli-
ance Lab and Free Software Licensing.

5. Emacs
The most popular, and most ported, version of Emacs is
GNU Emacs, which was created by Stallman for the GNU
Project.
Emacs is Extensible - The GNU Emacs manual describes
Emacs as the extensible, customizable, self-documenting,
real-time display editor.
Emacs Integrates well with lots of external tools, it pro-
vides commands to manipulate words and paragraphs,
syntax highlighting for making source code easier to read,
and keyboard macros for performing user-defined batches
of editing commands.

6. Open Source vs Free Software
Richard Stallman is known as a person who fought all his
life for right definitions of his project. Open Source vs Free
Software has always been a source of misunderstanding
between the respective user communities.
When you are speaking about free software, avoid saying
“for free” or “giveaway”, as it will change the meaning to
the issue about the cost, not the freedom, as human
rights.

7. Awards and Achievments
In 1991 Stallman was awarded by The Association for
Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper for pio-
neering work in the development of the extensible editor
EMACS (Editing Macros)."
In 2013 the Internet Hall of Fame inducted Stallman for his
contributions as creator of the GNU Project, main author
of the GNU General Public License, and his philosophical
contributions as founder of the free software move-
ment.Opinion/Views