Biography

Richard Stallman, a legendary hacker and spokesman for the cyberpunk movement, has been conducting a personal war against copyright for many years. In 1984 he founded the GNU project http://www.gnu.org and developed the "free" operating system GNU (an acronym for "GNU's Not Unix"), which, he says, gives computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small.

Today, Linux-based variants of the GNU system, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are in widespread use. They are often called Linux systems, but are properly referred to as GNU/Linux systems http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html.

Stallman is the principal author of the GNU C Compiler, a portable optimising compiler which was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30 different architectures. Front ends exist for C++, Objective C, CHILL and Fortran; Ada 9x and Pascal are in development. Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB), GNU Emacs, and various other GNU programs.

In 1991 Stallman received the Grace Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for his development of the first Emacs editor in the 1970s. He has received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1990, and an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden in 1996. In 1998 he and Linus Torvalds received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award.