Stallman, Richard

1953–

Computer Scientist

Richard M. Stallman is the developer of the GNU operating system (OS) and the founder of the Free Software Foundation. He pioneered the concept of “copyleft,” and made possible the development of the Linux operating system (or, as Stallman prefers to call it, GNU-Linux).

Stallman (who often goes by just his initials, RMS) got his start as a programmer in 1971 at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), while still an undergraduate at Harvard. He quickly became known both as a brilliant programmer (he authored EMACS, a powerful text editor) and as a fierce advocate of what some call “the hacker ethic”: the idea that information should be freely shared without proprietary restrictions. Upset by the growing bureaucratization of the freewheeling AI Lab, Stallman responded by organizing a boycott of the password system, advocating that everybody just enter a “null string” instead. Stallman is immortalized in Steven Levy's 1984 book Hackers as “The Last of the True Hackers.”

Working at MIT, Stallman grew frustrated by the restrictions imposed on programmers using proprietary versions of software. The AI Lab hackers had grown accustomed to tweaking the software that they used to improve performance—modifying a printer's driver software, for example, to alert users of paper jams. Increasingly, however, software providers were refusing to release the source code to their programs, making modifications impossible. A breaking point for Stallman occurred when the lab received one of the very first laser printers from Xerox in 1979. It was great—except for the frequent paper jams. Despite Stallman's pleas, Xerox refused to give him the source code to modify the printer software.

Finally, Stallman quit the lab in 1984 to write his own OS, one that could be freely distributed, modified by any user, and portable to any hardware platform. Stallman named the system GNU (pronounced “guh-NEW”), which, in a recursive joke, stands for “GNU's not UNIX.”

To make sure that his software would remain freely available and open to continued modification, Stallman organized the Free Software Foundation and developed the GNU General Public License (GPL for short). The GPL allows any user to copy, distribute, and/or modify software released under the license, as long as the user always makes all source code available, and as long as all terms of the GPL are transferred to all subsequent users. Software distributed under the GPL is copyrighted, but Stallman prefers the term copyleft, to emphasize that the purpose of the copyright is to guarantee users' continual freedom to distribute and modify the product, rather than to lock up proprietary rights.

Stallman clarified that when he talks about “free software,” he means “free as in free speech, not free beer.” Programmers are welcome to sell their versions of software for a price, as long they adhere to the GPL. But Stallman's system offers a fundamental critique to conventional capitalist notions of intellectual property. He insists that when a valuable commodity like software is infinitely reproducible at practically no extra cost, to refuse to share it is unjust. Stallman contrasts a computer program with a loaf of bread. If someone has a loaf of bread and someone else takes it, then the first person does not have it any more; it is a limited resource. But software is like an infinitely replicable loaf of bread. For someone not to share his program when he would still have his own is what Stallman calls “software hoarding.”

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