Richard Stallman in Lebanon

**Sheriff Ice** · 03-25-2009

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.

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.

**Google** · 05-31-2010

General Information
Free software is a matter of freedom. Hundreds of millions of people around the world today use Free Software as part of their daily business and computing practice. Most of these users, however, do not know the ethical reasons for which the free software community has developed such systems.
This conference is a premier forum on Free Software that brings together researchers, students, software developers, IT professionals, enthusiasts and the digital public. It groups leading lecturers in the domain, including Richard Stallman, the president of the Free Software Foundation and the world's leading advocate for software freedom.
In parallel with speeches and presentations, event sponsors conduct demonstrations in an exhibition space and interact with students and attendees in an interactive environment.

Conference Highlights
✔ Free software – ethics and practice
✔ Free software and patents
✔ The GNU general public license
✔ The GNU project
✔ Free software initiatives in the Arab region
✔ Free software education and certification
✔ Free software and Open Source Software
✔ Economics of Free Software

Schedule
09h30 Registration & Welcome Coffee

10h00 Welcome Notes
University of Balamand
Unesco Regional Office – Beirut
UNDP/ICTDAR

10h30 Ma3bar – A Free Software Initiative for the Arab Region
Walid Karam, Ma3bar Coordinator

10h50 Free Software in Ethics and in Practice
Richard Stallman, President, the Free Software Foundation

12h30 Lunch

14h00 Free Software in the Technical College
Peter Heath, Acting Chair for IT HD/BAS and Masters
programs at Abu Dhabi Men’s College (ADMC)

14h30 Free Software and Gnu/Linux certification
Feras Abou Chakra, LPI Middle East Managing Director

15h00 Copyright vs Community
Richard Stallman, President, the Free Software Foundation

16h40 Wrap-up discussions & recommendations

17h00 Closing Cocktail Buffet

17h30 Visit of the UOB Ethnographic Museum
& the Balamand Historic Monastery

Registration
Attendance is open to public and free of charge to students, software and IT professionals, and all persons interested in Free Software. However, registration is required.
For more information and registration, please register here, or contact fsc2010@ma3bar.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Post Conference Training
Train-the-Trainer Workshop – June 9-17, 2010
As part of our mission to promote Free Software in Arab societies, Ma3bar is conducting a Train-The Trainer workshop, which aims to increase the level of competence in Free Software environments and create a network of Arab GNU/Linux trainers capable of conducting further training in various countries of the Arab region.
The Workshop is conducted in partnership with LPI, and covers two courses, LPIC-1 and LPIC-2, which lead to the LPIC-1 renown certification.
For more information and registration, please visit our portal at http://ma3bar.org, or contact workshop@ma3bar.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Contact us
For more information, please contact
Dr. Walid P. Karam,
Coordinator, Ma3bar
University of Balamand, Al-Kurah, Lebanon
Tel: +(961) 6 930 250 x 3894
Fax: +(961) 6 930 278
Email: coordinator@ma3bar.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Conference e-mail: fsc2010@ma3bar.org

**Sheriff Ice** · 05-31-2010

when it going to be held is it the same time as the Post Conference Training ?

**Google** · 05-31-2010

Oh, it is weird that it is not mentioned lol.
The conference will be on Tuesday 8 June although he is coming on Sunday 6 June.

03-25-2009	#1
Sheriff Ice info@sync.com.lb Last Online: 11-29-2020 Join Date: Apr 2006 Posts: 3,827 Thanks: 1,348 Thanked 2,391 Times in 1,306 Posts Groans: 0 Groaned at 16 Times in 15 Posts	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. 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. __________________ http://www.gamync.com Lebanese Produced Mobiles Games by http://www.sync.com.lb

05-31-2010	#2
Google Last Online: 05-30-2013 Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 1,788 Thanks: 10,018 Thanked 1,100 Times in 651 Posts Groans: 1 Groaned at 6 Times in 6 Posts	We invited him and he is coming on 6 June General Information Free software is a matter of freedom. Hundreds of millions of people around the world today use Free Software as part of their daily business and computing practice. Most of these users, however, do not know the ethical reasons for which the free software community has developed such systems. This conference is a premier forum on Free Software that brings together researchers, students, software developers, IT professionals, enthusiasts and the digital public. It groups leading lecturers in the domain, including Richard Stallman, the president of the Free Software Foundation and the world's leading advocate for software freedom. In parallel with speeches and presentations, event sponsors conduct demonstrations in an exhibition space and interact with students and attendees in an interactive environment. Conference Highlights ✔ Free software – ethics and practice ✔ Free software and patents ✔ The GNU general public license ✔ The GNU project ✔ Free software initiatives in the Arab region ✔ Free software education and certification ✔ Free software and Open Source Software ✔ Economics of Free Software Schedule 09h30 Registration & Welcome Coffee 10h00 Welcome Notes University of Balamand Unesco Regional Office – Beirut UNDP/ICTDAR 10h30 Ma3bar – A Free Software Initiative for the Arab Region Walid Karam, Ma3bar Coordinator 10h50 Free Software in Ethics and in Practice Richard Stallman, President, the Free Software Foundation 12h30 Lunch 14h00 Free Software in the Technical College Peter Heath, Acting Chair for IT HD/BAS and Masters programs at Abu Dhabi Men’s College (ADMC) 14h30 Free Software and Gnu/Linux certification Feras Abou Chakra, LPI Middle East Managing Director 15h00 Copyright vs Community Richard Stallman, President, the Free Software Foundation 16h40 Wrap-up discussions & recommendations 17h00 Closing Cocktail Buffet 17h30 Visit of the UOB Ethnographic Museum & the Balamand Historic Monastery Registration Attendance is open to public and free of charge to students, software and IT professionals, and all persons interested in Free Software. However, registration is required. For more information and registration, please register here, or contact fsc2010@ma3bar.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Post Conference Training Train-the-Trainer Workshop – June 9-17, 2010 As part of our mission to promote Free Software in Arab societies, Ma3bar is conducting a Train-The Trainer workshop, which aims to increase the level of competence in Free Software environments and create a network of Arab GNU/Linux trainers capable of conducting further training in various countries of the Arab region. The Workshop is conducted in partnership with LPI, and covers two courses, LPIC-1 and LPIC-2, which lead to the LPIC-1 renown certification. For more information and registration, please visit our portal at http://ma3bar.org, or contact workshop@ma3bar.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Contact us For more information, please contact Dr. Walid P. Karam, Coordinator, Ma3bar University of Balamand, Al-Kurah, Lebanon Tel: +(961) 6 930 250 x 3894 Fax: +(961) 6 930 278 Email: coordinator@ma3bar.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Conference e-mail: fsc2010@ma3bar.org __________________

05-31-2010	#3
Sheriff Ice info@sync.com.lb Last Online: 11-29-2020 Join Date: Apr 2006 Posts: 3,827 Thanks: 1,348 Thanked 2,391 Times in 1,306 Posts Groans: 0 Groaned at 16 Times in 15 Posts	when it going to be held is it the same time as the Post Conference Training ? __________________ http://www.gamync.com Lebanese Produced Mobiles Games by http://www.sync.com.lb

05-31-2010	#4
Google Last Online: 05-30-2013 Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 1,788 Thanks: 10,018 Thanked 1,100 Times in 651 Posts Groans: 1 Groaned at 6 Times in 6 Posts	Oh, it is weird that it is not mentioned lol. The conference will be on Tuesday 8 June although he is coming on Sunday 6 June. __________________

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)