Richard Matthew Stallman (frequently abbreviated to RMS) (born March 16, 1953) is the founder of the free software movement, the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, and the League for Programming Freedom. An acclaimed hacker, his major accomplishments include Emacs (and the later GNU Emacs), the GNU C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. He is also the author of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL), the most widely-used free software license, which pioneered the concept of the copyleft.

Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time as a political campaigner, advocating free software and campaigning against software idea patents and expansions of copyright law. The time that he still devotes to programming is spent on GNU Emacs. He supports himself by being paid for around half of the speeches he gives.

Biography

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Stallman was born in Manhattan, New York, to Alice Lippman. His first access to a computer came during his senior year at high school in 1969. Hired by the IBM New York Scientific Center, Stallman used the summer after his high-school graduation writing his first program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM 360. "I first wrote it in PL/I, then started over in assembly language when the PL/I program was too big to fit in the computer" he later said.

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The Seattle Times: Business & Technology

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NYT > Technology

Judge Orders Google to Turn Over YouTube Records
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CNN.com - Technology

Judge orders YouTube to reveal its viewers
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Read full story for latest details.
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NPR Topics: Technology

Twitter, What Are You Doing? Co-Founder Tells All
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BBC News | Technology | UK Edition

Google must divulge YouTube log
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Reuters Video: Technology

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AP Top Technology News At 5 p.m. EDT

Court orders YouTube to give Viacom video logs
By ANICK JESDANUN Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:57:36 -0000
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Police wnt u to fight crime w/txt msgs
By MITCH STACY Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:35:43 -0000
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CNET News.com

EA debuts new family, sports games for Wii, PlayStation
Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:32:00 -0700
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