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 Continue reading the remaining 94% ...