Richard M. Stallman is visiting Sri Lanka this week. He will conduct two public lectures on free software movement at University of Peradeniya, on 16th January at 2.00pm and SLIIT, on 18th January at 10am.
RMS is one of the most passionate activists I have ever met in my life. He is somebody who lives according to what he preaches. He uses an old laptop (it is so old that the screen now hangs with two copper cables) and that has no proprietary software. Never seen him wearing anything other than t-shirts and denims. But here is someone who has influenced millions of developers across the world, as often called as the father of FOSS.
More details:
Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated `RMS` is an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. In September
1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project`s lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project he started the free software movement, and in October 1985 set up the Free Software Foundation.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.
More details about RMS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_stallman
16 Jan 2008 08:05:33 GMT