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| Richard Stallman |
As a child of "broken home", Stallman has no good relationship with both parents. Stallman has an interesting and controversial personality in high school, he always gets A for Mathematics and Physics (and even then he called himself "math you", which sounds similar to "Matthew"). But fail in English class, due to the "keraskepalaannya" refused to write the essay in any form. Even the "geniuses" at school was not able to understand his personality is very difficult to socialize.
Stallman graduated majoring in Physics at Harvard University in 1974. During the period kulaihnya, Stallman worked as staff at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. While this is Stallman learned about the development of the Operating System.
In the 1980s, Stallman began to deal with the "enemy" until now, the "commercialization of the software industry". This effort begins with some "hackers" to establish a company called "Symbolics", which tries to replace "free software" used in the Lab., With their homemade software. For two years, from 1983 to 1985, Stallman fought frustrate monopoly Symbolics programmers. Before he was made to stop their activities and sign the enclosed agreement.
At the January 1984 Stallman resigned from MIT and start the "GNU project". GNU (an acronym for "GNU's Not Unix", GNU, not Unix-) is a free operating system which is an alternative to Unix. A recently described variant of Linux-based GNU system began to popular use. Estimated user "GNU / Linux systems" (better known as "Linux" anyway) has reached 20 million people.
Stallman is the author of "The GNU compiler Collection", a portable compiler that can be devoted to a variety of architectures and programming languages. Besides, he also wrote "Symbollic GNU debugger (gdb)", "GNU Emacs" and various other GNU programs.
"GNU Project", is actually one form of Stallman's efforts to fight for "free software". In addition to GNU, he also made other efforts to establish the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the development of the concept of "Copyleft" (the opposite of "Copyright") and then the inclusion of the "GNU General Public License" (GPL) in the year 1989.
Stallman presence in the computer world has been recognized on the world stage, is characterized from a variety pengahargaan received. Among them, "Grace Hopper Award" in 1991 for his work in making the editor "Emacs", "Takeda Award" he received in 2001, along with Linus Torvalds (Linux developers) and Ken Sakamura (developers of TRON), and other awards. In addition Stallman also received an Honorary Doctorate degree from the Swedish Institute of Technology (1996), and the University of Glasgow (2001).
Until now, Stallman still fighting for the existence of "free software". Time will tell, will Stallman's name in history as a pioneer of "free software", or simply as a desperate fight against the current controversial. But it all does not matter, because like what he says in his biography, "I've never been Able to work out detailed plans of what the future was going to be like ... I just said` I'm going to fight, Who knows where I'll get? "("I never can think of a detailed plan about what will happen in the future ... I'm just saying, I will fight. Who knows, I'm going to where?").
