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\"Stallman\" redirects here. For the flutist, see Robert Stallman. For the speculative fiction author, see Robert Lester Stallman.

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Richard Stallman
$\"Stallman$ Stallman in 2024
Born	Richard Matthew Stallman (1953-03-16) March 16, 1953 (age 71) New York City, New York, U.S.
Other names	rms (RMS)
Education	Harvard University (BS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (attended)
Occupations	Activist programmer
Known for	Free software movement GNU GNU Emacs GNU Compiler Collection GNU General Public License copyleft Free Software Foundation
Awards	MacArthur Fellowship ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award EFF Pioneer Award ACM Software System Award Internet Hall of Fame
Website	stallman.org $\"Edit$
Signature

Richard Matthew Stallman (/\u02c8st\u0254\u02d0lm\u0259n/ STAWL-m\u0259n; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms,^[1] is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software which ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985,^[2] developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.\n

Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to write a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software.^[3] With that he also launched the free software movement. He has been the GNU project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including among others, the GNU Compiler Collection,^[4] GNU Debugger,^[5] and GNU Emacs text editor.^[6]\n

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify, and distribute free software. He is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license.^[7]\n

In 1989, he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management (which he refers to as digital restrictions management, calling the more common term misleading), and other legal and technical systems which he sees as taking away users' freedoms. That includes software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats, and binary executables without source code.\n

In September 2019, Stallman resigned as president of the FSF and left his visiting scientist role at MIT after making controversial comments about the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal.^[8] Stallman remained head of the GNU Project, and in 2021 returned to the FSF board of directors and others.\n

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Authority control databases $\"Edit$
International	ISNI VIAF FAST WorldCat
National	Germany United States France BnF data Japan Italy Spain Netherlands Norway Croatia Korea Poland 2 Israel Finland
Academics	CiNii Association for Computing Machinery Scopus zbMATH DBLP
Artists	MusicBrainz
People	Deutsche Biographie DDB
Other	IdRef

Early life

Harvard University and MIT

Events leading to GNU

GNU project

Activism

Copyright reduction

Terminologies

Open source and Free software

Linux and GNU

Surveillance resistance

Comments about Jeffrey Epstein scandal

Return to FSF

Personal life

Honors and awards

Selected publications

See also

References

External links