R I C H A R D
S T A L L M A N
TALKS
Richard Matthew Stallman was born in 1953, he attended Harvard starting in 1970 and graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts in physics. From September 1974 to June 1975, he was a graduate student in physics at MIT.
He worked at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT from 1971 to 1984, learning operating system development. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1976, and developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance.
In 1983 Stallman announced the project to develop the GNU operating system. Stallman resigned from MIT employment in order to develop the GNU OS and in October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation, of which he is president as a full-time volunteer. Stallman developed a number of widely used software components of the GNU system: the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various others.
WHO IS RICHARD STALLMAN?
RICHARD STALLMAN TALKS
When: OCTOBER 17, 2015
Where: KIVA AUDITORIUM
Kent State University
800 E. Summit St. Kent, Ohio 44240
TIME: 1:00 - 3:30 PM
Free and open to the public
The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also contains the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers, and are now preinstalled in computers available in retail stores. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman spends most of his time in political advocacy for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license, which implements copyleft.
Stallman gives speeches frequently about free software and related topics including: "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software movement", and "A Free Digital Society", which treats several different threats to the freedom of computer users today.
