Vcoderz Community - Richard Stallman in Lebanon

Since this forum is dedicated for e-learning,
and since some people has affected the IT/software/hardware/computer in a way that they entered history and cannot be put aside.

We are going to start our new series "Who Are They?!" or "WAT".

A new Biography for a person who affected in a way on in an another way the modern computer society is going to be published.

Our Featured and Honored First Episode of the Series will be Dedicated to the man who made the biggest revolution in the computer history.

Some consider him an extremist , the others looks at him as the man who saved the computer from the Business/money wales.

Richard Stallman -- WHO IS HE?!

Richard Matthew Stallman a.k.a. "rms"

rms born March 16, 1953, as he say :"I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953".

Hired by the IBM New York Scientific Center, Stallman spent the summer after his high-school graduation writing his first program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM System/360. Stallman scored 1597 on the SAT (800 Math, 797 Verbal).

In June 1971, as a first year student at Harvard University, Stallman was known for his strong performance in Math 55 and became a programmer at the AI Laboratory of MIT. There he became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, "rms".

In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement Stallman also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws.

Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely-used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

Stallman has written many essays on software freedom and since the early 1990s has been an outspoken political campaigner for the free software movement. The speeches he has regularly given are titled The GNU project and the Free Software movement, The Dangers of Software Patents, and Copyright and Community in the age of computer networks.His uncompromising attitude on ethical issues concerning computers and software has caused some people to label him as radical and extremist.

In 2006 and 2007, during the eighteen month public consultation for the drafting of version 3 of the GNU General Public License, he added a fourth topic explaining the proposed changes.

Stallman's staunch advocacy for free software inspired "Virtual Richard M. Stallman" (vrms), software that analyzes the packages currently installed on a Debian GNU/Linux system, and report those that are from the non-free tree.Stallman would disagree with parts of Debian's definition of free software.

In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free on-line encyclopedia through the means of inviting the public to contribute articles.

In August 2006 at his meetings with the government of the Indian State of Kerala, he persuaded officials to discard proprietary software, such as Microsoft's, at state-run schools. This has resulted in a landmark decision to switch all school computers in 12,500 high schools from Windows to a free software operating system.

Protesting against proprietary software in April 2006, Stallman held a "Don't buy from ATI, enemy of your freedom" placard at a speech by an ATI representative in the building where Stallman works, resulting in the police being called.ATI has since merged with AMD Corporation and has taken small steps to make their hardware documentation available for use by the free software community.

Stallman has devoted the bulk of his life’s energies to political and software activism. Professing to care little for material wealth, he explains that "I've always lived cheaply … like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do."

Stallman recommends not owning a mobile phone,as he believes the tracking of cell phones creates harmful privacy issues. Also, Stallman avoids use of a key card to enter the building where his office is.
Such a system would track doors entered and times. For personal reasons, he does not browse the web from his computer.

How rms uses computer by his words:

I stopped using the OLPC because the OLPC project made their machine act as a platform for running Windows. Now I use a Lemote machine which has a free startup program and all free software. Since the processor is a variant of MIPS, Windows does not support it.
I occasionally use X11 for tasks that need graphics, but mostly I use a text console. I find that the text console is more efficient for the bulk of the work I do, which is editing text.
I spend most of my time editing in Emacs. I read and send mail with Emacs using M-x rmail and C-x m. I edit the pages on this site with Emacs also, although most of the simple editing is done by volunteer helpers.
I have several free web browsers on my laptop, but I generally use my own machine only to talk with a few sites operated for or by the GNU Project, FSF or me. I will fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them much like wget and then mails them back to me.
The programming languages I use are Lisp and C. They are also my favorite languages. However, since around 1992 I have been very busy with free software activism, too busy to do much programming. As a result, I have not had time to learn newer languages such as Perl, Python or Ruby. I recently did read a book about Java and found it interesting to compare with C.
I firmly refuse to install non-free software or tolerate its installed presence on my computer or on computers set up for me to use.

However, if I am visiting somewhere and the machines available nearby happen to contain non-free software, through no doing of mine, I don't utterly refuse to touch them. I will use them briefly for tasks such as browsing. This limited usage doesn't give my assent to the software's license, or make me responsible its being present in the computer, or make me possessor of a copy of it, so I don't see an ethical obligation to refrain from this. Of course, I explain that they should migrate the machines to free software.

Likewise, I don't need to worry about what software is in a kiosk, pay phone, or ATM that I am using. I hope their owners migrate them to free software, for their sake, but there's no need for me to refuse to touch them until then. (I do consider what those machines and their owners might do with my personal data, but that's a different issue. My response to that issue is to minimize those activities which involve giving any personal data.)

That reasoning assumes I was not responsible for setting up those machines or for how it was done. By contrast, if I were to ask or lead someone to set up a computer for me to use, that would make me ethically responsible for its software load. In such a case I insist on free software, just as if the machine were mine.

Skype is a special exception. Using Skype to talk with someone else means that other person must use Skype too. Even supposing my host has Skype already installed on his computer, my using it briefly would not be harmless — it would constitute encouraging my interlocutor to have and use Skype. My conclusion is: never use Skype even for a moment.
I believe that one should not buy or tolerate any product with Digital Restrictions Management unless one personally possesses the means to break the DRM chains. I do not have a copy of DeCSS, so I do not buy or rent encrypted DVDs, or even accept them as gifts. You shouldn't do so either, unless you have DeCSS or another free program to play them with. DRM is an attack on your freedom, and the companies that implement DRM are the ones attacking it.

Stallman's writings on free software issues can be found in Free Software, Free Society . He has received the following awards:

1986: Honorary life time membership of the Chalmers Computer Society
1990: Receives the exceptional merit award MacArthur 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)."[70]
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.
2004: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú.
2005: Fundazione Pistoletto prize.
2007: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.
2007: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote.
2007: Honorary doctorate from the University of Pavia.

Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._ifi_large.jpg

References: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

This is in brief the Biography of the man who started the Free Open Source Revolution.

Personally I am a big fan of his ideas and views, and hope one day the lebanese universities adopt the GNU/linux OS and Free open Source applications.