Subject areaProcess and organisation
Also known asRMS
Richard Stallman is the American programmer who shaped the free software movement.
In 1983, while working at the artificial intelligence lab of MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), he announced the GNU project, an entirely free operating system; in 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation, the organisation that supports it. For Stallman free software is a matter of freedom: whoever uses a program must be able to run, study, modify and redistribute it.
To protect those freedoms he wrote the GPL (GNU General Public License), the licence that applies copyleft: anyone who redistributes a modified program must keep it free on the same terms. The GNU tools, combined with the Linux kernel, form the GNU/Linux system. Stallman distinguishes free software from open source, which he sees as a label focused on practical advantages rather than principles.
An example
The case below is constructed, because the term does not yet appear in the articles. A manufacturing company that modifies a GPL-licensed program for its own plant can use it freely, but if it distributes it to customers it must also share the modified code: this is the copyleft Stallman devised.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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