Richard Matthew Stallman | Biography

His stringy brown hair and mesmerizing green eyes once inspired the computer trade publication LinuxWorld to describe him as "Rasputin-like." At times during his controversial career, Richard Stallman lived in his ninth-floor office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), surrounded by books, printouts, and a blinking computer terminal. But Wired magazine has declared him "one of the greatest programmers alive."

Stallman, recipient of a $240,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1990, authored principal parts of the GNU/Linux operating system, estimated at the turn of the millennium to have more than 10 million users worldwide. He also founded the GNU Project and is founding president of the non-profit Free Software Foundation.

Stallman was born in New York City, two years after UNIVAC I (the machine that started the modern era of general-purpose commercial computers) was completed for the U.S. Bureau of the Census. His passion for the computer first developed during his high school days. It began at a summer camp, where Stallman devoured computer manuals borrowed from counselors. He returned to Manhattan and pursued his newfound interest at a computing center there. By the time Stallman finished high school, he was considered an expert in computer operating systems, assembly languages, and text editors.

In 1971, as an undergraduate at Harvard University, Stallman walked into MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he so impressed administrator Russ Noftsker that he was offered work as a systems programmer. He developed improvements to a computer operating system called ITS (Incompatible Time-Sharing).

Because he worked mainly at night, Stallman's coworkers at the lab were unaware that he was also a student by day. "When the people in the lab discovered after the fact that he was simultaneously earning a magna cum laude degree in physics at Harvard, even those master hackers were astonished," Steven Levy wrote in a chapter devoted to Stallman in his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

Speaking to students at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology in 1986, Stallman recalled a refreshing openness at the MIT lab: "The terminals were thought of [as] belonging to everyone, and professors locked them up in their offices on pain of finding their doors broken down.... Many times I would climb over ceilings or underneath floors to unlock rooms that had machines in them that people needed to use, and I would usually leave behind a note explaining to the people that they shouldn't be so selfish as to lock the door." Unlocked doors were just one manifestation of an entire philosophy at the AI laboratory, which also deliberately avoided protecting its computer files.

In the 1970s, however, MIT began requiring passwords to access many of its computers. Stallman worked to undermine this development. "In the old days on ITS, it was considered desirable that everyone could look at any file, change any file, because we had reasons to," he recalled during his Stockholm speech. He infiltrated MIT's password system, and sent messages to users, encouraging them to switch their passwords to a simple carriage return. "It's much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords," he told the system users. "Eventually I got to a point where a fifth of all the users on the machine had the Empty String password," he later told Levy.

Since those days at the AI lab, Stallman has clung to his controversial belief that computer software should not be owned or copyrighted. This conviction was to be deeply tested. Stallman's boss, Russ Noftsker, left MIT in 1973 with the intention of starting a company that would develop artificial intelligence machines. The result, formed in 1977, was Symbolics, a company that offended Stallman by hiring away many of MIT's brightest hackers, then persuading MIT to buy its machines. Determined to get revenge, Stallman helped a rival company, LMI, by producing enhancements to LMI's operating system that matched those introduced by Symbolics.

Then, in 1984, he left MIT to start the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Stallman's idea was to create an operating system compatible with the popular UNIX system, but one that users would be free to copy, redistribute, or change. To allow modifications, the system's source code would also be freely available. He called this proposed operating system GNU (a recursive acronym: GNU's Not Unix). The foundation was established to promote the development of GNU, and to work to eliminate restrictions on the copying, redistribution, understanding, and modification of computer programs.

Stallman was the principal or initial author of some critical components of GNU, including GNU Emacs (a widely used text editor), GNU C Compiler (which supports seven programming languages and more than 30 computer architectures), as well as a GNU debugging program. The many pieces of the GNU system were finally brought together by a "kernel" written by Linus Torvalds. The name of this kernel, Linux, is now widely used to describe the full GNU/Linux operating system.

In a 1999 interview with LinuxToday, Stallman said that a free operating system had been achieved, but more free application software was needed. "I know that many of the companies that make proprietary applications are now starting to release versions of them that run on GNU/Linux. It's a step forward.... But it's only the first step. It's not the same as fully having freedom. To fully have freedom you've got to be using a free application instead of a proprietary one. So, we need to develop large numbers of free applications."

Now considered a legendary computer hacker, Stallman derives much of his income from speaking engagements. "Fortunately, I live cheaply," he told Joe Barr from LinuxWorld. "I've resisted acquiring the expensive habits that some other people pick up as soon as they get enough money to. You know, like houses and cars and children and boats and planes."

However, Stallman has picked up some other, less-expensive interests. His Internet home page lists these as: "affection, international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, recorder, puns, [and] science fiction fandom."