Monday, March 31, 2003
12:30-1:30 pm
Moot Court Room
Stanford University Law School
Lunch will be provided
All Welcome
about the speaker
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 has the freedom to copy it
and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small.
The GNU/Linux system, basically GNU with Linux added as the kernel, is
used on tens of millions of computers today. See www.gnu.org for more
information about GNU and free software.
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's book of essays, Free Software, Free Society, was published
in October 2002.
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. In 2001 he received a
second honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow, and shared
the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment with Torvalds and Ken
Sakamura. In 2002 he was elected to the US National Academy of
Engineering.