Richard M. Stallman

Richard Stallman (http://www.stallman.org)

Richard Matthew Stallman is the founder of the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation, and the Free software movement. He is also the author of the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is the most widely-used free software license. At it's heart ist the principle of copyleft (Copyleft licenses use existing copyright laws to ensure that every person who receives a copy or derived version of the work, can freely use, modify and redistribute it). His other major accomplishments are GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, and the Gnu Debugger.

He started using computers in high school and wrote his first program after his high school graduation. In 1971 he bacame a programmer/hacker at the MIT Ai laboratory. One year later he worked for a timesharing company with Eben Moglen, now a well known technology attorney.

In the late 80' he published the GNU (GNU is a recursive acronym standing for GNU's not Unix) Manifesto (in it he described his motivation for creating a free, Unix compatible operating system), invented the concept of copyleft, and started the Free Software Foundation. By 1991 the userspace tools for a GNU operating system were ready, all that was missing was a kernel. In 1991 a independent free software project produced the Linux kernel, which combined together with the GNU userspace tools made a free operating system - GNU/Linux.

Lately he has spent most of his time as a campaigner advocating free software and fighting against software idea patents and expansions of copyright law. He also still devotes some time to improving Gnu Emacs.

In my opinion he is a hero because of his fight for free software. Free software allows us to be independent of software corporations, because their interest are usually not the same as our interests.