Richard Stallman is a free software movement activist and programmer. He regularly campaigns in favor of giving users the ability to modify, study, and use software in whatever way the user desires. This is not about not putting price tags on software, rather the free use of owned software regardless of what the user paid for it. Stallman is credited with the creation of some projects and foundations which have been very important in the free software movement. Stallman has lead the charge in favor of free software for many years, since the nineteen eighty’s in fact. Richard Stallman’s impact on the free software movement has been great and he was and still is arguably the most important face of the free software movement.
Richard Stallman was born in 1953 in New York City to some rough parents, who he would later describe as “tyrants(1)”. Stallman did not get along with his parents and constantly butted heads with them growing up. His father was a drunk who was abusive. He was finally comfortable in his life during his first year of college at Harvard as a physics undergrad. While at Harvard, he found himself hanging out with hackers in a school lab. The school had interesting rules, “For instance, they didn’t write security code for the lab’s machines because it could be used against them. They decided not to put chains around their necks and hand them to the administrators says Stallman(1).” They also had an unofficial policy on not locking offices that had computers, incase someone wanted to use them. Not everyone would follow this policy, so Stallman would break into offices if he wanted to and said “I found that powerfully inspiring(1).”
After Richard Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974, he went on to MIT as a Physics graduate student. After a leg injury stopped him from dancing, he lost his passion for physics. After one year as a graduate student, he shifted his focus to computers. Stallman stayed at MIT as an employee rather than a student for over ten years. (2.) Towards the end of his time there, he announced a huge project, the GNU operating system. “I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it (3).” This quote comes from Stallman’s announcement letter of GNU. According to his announcement letter, GNU was intended to run Unix programs without being identical to Unix. This is why Stallman wanted to write GNU: “I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free (3).” Clearly, Stallman was very passionate about free software at this time, this passion has not died out and has only expanded his career. The GNU announcement is credited with launching the free software movement.
It is important at this point to clearly lay out what Stallman means by “free software” as there has been a lot of confusion in the past. “Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software(4).” “Free software” is about liberty and freedom, not frugality and price. Being in favor of free software is a lot like being in favor of free speech. “Free Software means software that respects the user's freedom. Software available to you but without respecting your freedom is called proprietary software or non-Free Software. Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to share with other people, and helpless because the users don't have the source code, so they can't change anything, they can't even tell what the program is really doing (5).” The term “libre software” comes from the free software movement as the word “libre” is closer to freedom/liberty than literal monetary cost.
Just over a year after the GNU announcement, Stallman established the Free Software Foundation to support the movement that he created. When Stallman first founded it, The Free Software Foundation was originally a non profit organization that used their funds to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU project. Since the mid nineties, the Free Software Foundation’s employees and volunteers mostly work on legal issues and advocating for the free software movement. Of course the foundation is still a non profit, but their work has shifted. The Free Software Foundation only uses free software to complete their work(6).
Since 1998, The Free Software Foundation has granted the award for the Advancement of Free Software every year. In 2005 they began giving out another annual award called the Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit. Until 2006, they presented the awards in different convention centers and sometimes in Brussels at the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting. From 2006 on, they have presented the award at the Free Software Foundation’s annual meeting in Massachusetts. The Advancement of Free Software award is presented by the Free Software Foundation to a person that they believe has made a positive contribution to the progress and development of free software. The Free Software Foundation released an article in 2005 stating that “This award is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life.(7)” All of the winners have to have been nominated by their peers and voted in by Stallman and a few other trusted members of the Free Software Foundation. These two awards have motivated people to be spread the importance and awareness of Free Software and have most certainly helped Richard Stallman and his organization in their efforts to make Free Software a universal norm.
Richard Stallman also pioneered the idea of Copyleft. Stallman was not the first to come up with the word or basic idea of copyleft, but he was the first to implement and popularize it. Copyleft is a method of making a program free and requiring all future third party modified versions of the program to also be free. “The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements…But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software. They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away(8).” Copyleft is a play on the word “copyright” but they are not entirely different. In order to copyleft a program, you first need to copyright it, and then add distribution terms to allow everyone to use, modify, and distribute the code only if the distribution terms remain. The purpose of the copyright is to stop people from modifying the software then selling it as proprietary software, as long as a person or business follows the distribution terms, GNU and the Free Software Foundation allows anyone to do whatever they would like with the program, with permission. “When we explain to the employer that it is illegal to distribute the improved version except as free software, the employer usually decides to release it as free software rather than throw it away(8).” Copyleft has advanced the free software community greatly as it both promotes the use and release of free software, and stops the creation of proprietary software stemming from somebody else’s free software.
Richard Stallman used the idea of copyleft and evolved it into the GNU General Public License which was the first copyleft license for general use and is one of the most popular Free Software licenses. The GNU General Public license, is widely used today as a means to guarantee end users the freedom to modify, use, and share software. In the nineties, Stallman enforced the General Public License informally through short email exchanges with the Violator of the license. As these violations became more complex, Stallman let lawyers and others at the Free Software Foundation to handle the violations.
In 2004, gpl-violations.org was founded by Harald Welte at the Free Software Foundation to fight violations against GNU’s General Public License. According to the website, the goal of the project is to raise public awareness and ultimately inform companies that distributing products based on the General Public License’s software is illegal and that while it is free software, it is not in the public domain, and that they need to fulfill the license obligations. Welte actually received Stallman’s Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 2007. The website is now dormant, the they continue to handle the enforcement of GNU’s General Public License.
Richard Stallman was also the author of the GNU Compiler Collection. The Compiler Collection is a system that supports various programming languages. The GNU Compiler Collection is distributed under the GNU General Public License and it has promoted the growth of the free software movement. The reason it is such a good example for the free software movement is that is was originally only built for the C programming language. Over the past 30 years, through the General Public License modifications have been made and it has been extended to handle C++, variations of that, Fortran, Java, Go, Ada, and more(10). GNU’s general Compiler Collection has been adopted by many operating systems including GNU, Linux, BSD, and versions of it are available Windows, Android, and iOS.
Richard Stallman has pioneered many fronts of the Free Software Movement and is the sole reason that the Free Software Movement has been so successful. Stallman’s work in the GNU Project made so many ripple effects in the field that his impact has truly been the most important thing to happen to the free software movement. Stallman’s use and popularization of copyleft has spread free software like a virus. Because he licensed his programs that people wanted to use and distribute, he second-handedly helped create countless programs and modified versions of programs which only helps the advancement of technology, as well as the free software movement. The more people use free software, and develop software based on free software, the more popular the idea gets. Eventually, thanks to Richard Stallman, proprietary software could become a thing of the past.