History and Structure

Richard Stallman

Introduction

Richard Matthew Stallman also known as rms is a software Developer and a software freedom activist. Richard Matthew Stallman was born in new york city in 1953 to Daniel Stallman and Alice Lippman. His first expierience with computers was at the IBM New York Scientific Center. Richards hobbies include affection, international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, recorder, puns, science fiction and programming. He was the president of the Free Software Foundation.

        Richard went to Harvard University he was known for hes strong performance in math55 and became a programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was in Harvard where he bacame close with the hacker community. Stallman enrolled in physics at MIT but abandoned it and remained a programmer at the MIT AI Laboratory. At the end of hes first year in harvard he suffered a knee injury and had to drop the International folk dancing. Stalman dropped his pursuit in a doctorate in physics because of programing.

        While a graduate student at MIT Stallman published a paper on an AI truth maintenance system called dependency-directed backtracking with Gerarld Jay Sussman.

Discussion

        Richard Stallman joined the group of hackers at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1971. He worked on projects like TECO, Emacs and the lisp machine operating system. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system meant to be free software and has been the leader of that project ever since. Also in 1985 richard started up a foundation called the free software foundation.

Since the mid-1900s Richard has spent most of his time wanting to get free software. Also richard stallman has invented widely used software components.of the GNU system. Some of the components that Stallman had were the GNU Compiler Collection. The GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU emacs, and other programs for the GNU operationg system. I have also learned that Stallman pioneered the consept of copyleft and is the main author of the GNU general public license.A couple of speeches that Richard gives frequently are the GNU operating system and free software movement, the dangers of software parents and copyright and community in the age of computer networks.

In 1999 Richard set up the free online encyclopedia by inviting the public to contribute articles. The paper he puplished on AI truth maintenance sysem was an early work of the problem of intelligent backtracking of constraint satisfaction problems. From 2003 the technique Richard and Sussman introduced is still the most general and powerful form of backtracking. Also a technique they used with constraint recording, where partial results- of a search were recorded to be used later were also introduced in this paper.

Here is a list of the awards Richard Stallman has revieved:

• •.1990: Richard receives a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship  

• •.1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award "For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)." 

• •.1996: Honorary doctorate from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology  

• •.1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award  

• •.1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award  

• •.2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being  

• •.2001: Honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow  

• •.2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership  

• •.2003: Honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel  

• •.2004: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Salta, in Argentina  

• •.2004: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Peú  

• •.2005: Fundazione Pistoletto prize  

• •.2007: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in Peru  

• •.2007: First Premio Iternacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre  

• •.2007: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote, in Peru  

• •.2007: Honorary doctorate from the University of Pavia  

• •.2008: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru  

• •.2009: Honorary doctor of science degree from Lakehead University in Canada  

Conclusion

        The conclusion that I have come to as that Richard Stallman was a very inteligent and well accomplished man completing a free operating system called GNU a system that today millions of people use and often people refer it to linux. GNU was announced on September 23rd it started the GNU operating system which started on January 1984. I have also learned that he has devoted his life to political and software activism. He always lived cheaply like a student and he likes that because it shows him that money is not telling him what to do. He describes himself as a squatter on campus.

Also from what I have learned about Stallman is that he like hes privacy because he does not want a mobile phone, He said he does not believe in mobile phones because the tracking of cell phones creates harmful privacy issues and also he does not use hes key card to enter the building where hes office mailbox is because he said such a system would track doors entered and times. For personal reasons, he usually does not browse the web from his computer, he uses wget and reads the fetched pages from hes e-mail mailbox because he said it limits direct access via browsers to a few sites such as his own or those related to his work with GNU and the FSF.

The Free Software Foundation from what I have read I think is richards biggest accomplishment. The  free software foundation is is a non profit corporation. It was founded on the 4th october 1985 to support the free software movement.it aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software.