|
New England
Chapter of the American Society for
Information
Science
N E A S I S Symposium: 6 December 1999 Open Source and Free Systems/Software: About Richard Stallman
GNU's Not Unix!
"The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement", Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Edited by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman & Mark Stone, January 1999. Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for "GNU's Not Unix"), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. Today, Linux-based variants of the GNU system, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are in widespread use. There are estimated to be over 10 million users of GNU/Linux systems today. Richard Stallman is the principal author of the GNU C Compiler, a portable optimizing compiler which was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30 different architectures and 7 programming languages. Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB), GNU Emacs, and various other GNU programs. Stallman received the Grace Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for 1991 for his development of the first Emacs editor in the 1970s. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award along with Linus Torvalds; in 1999 he received the Yuri Rubinski memorial award. |
|
Brought to you by the NEASIS Program Committee For Further Information, please contact:
|