Richard Stallman and Linux

Richard Stallman was born on March 16, 1953, in New York City. From a young age, he also had a passion for computers like ours. At the time, he was reading a book (manual) on how to operate the IBM 7094 computer, which was popular during Richard's boyhood.

He later worked as a volunteer laboratory assistant at Rockefeller University. But this is not a computer lab, it's a biology lab. At the same time, Richard was very interested in subjects such as mathematics and physics. The professor who taught Richard thought, that Richard would one day be a good biologist.

Richard first started working with a computer at the IBM New York Scientific Center. When Richard Stallman was in high school (he was 17), he was involved in writing a computer program that could perform statistical analysis in the FORTRAN programming language. FORTRAN is not used, it's not even worth mentioning that it is a computer language compared to other computer languages. He then wrote a text editor using the APL language and a preprocessor for the PL / I language, a computer language introduced by IBM.

University and MIT life

Later, Richard entered the prestigious Harvard University. As a first-year student at Harvard University, Richard excelled in mathematics. That is why he has been very happy.

By 1971, Richard was in his first year at Harvard University. Richard was only 18 at the time. Even then, he had the opportunity to work as a programmer at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This artificial intelligence laboratory was later renamed the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Also known as the "Hackers" at the time, Richard was an active member of the Association of Computer Programmers who strongly believed that computer code was something anyone could freely use and use as they wished. In that society, Richard is known by the three initials of his name, RMS, which he used in computer accounts. (Richard Matthew Stallman) In 1974, he graduated from Harvard University with a degree in physics.

Richard initially planned to pursue a postgraduate degree in physics at Harvard. But due to his interest in computer programming, he stopped halfway and started working at the MIT AI Laboratory. He started his career in 1975 as a Research Assistant.

In 1977, a paper on artificial intelligence technology was presented, led by Gerry Sussman and with the participation of Richard. The contents of that pamphlet are still considered important today.

As a member of the "hacker" in the AI laboratory, Richard contributed to the development of TECO, the text editor of the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) operating system, and Emacs, another text editor. He has also contributed to the creation of operating systems for computers known as Lisp machines. The Emacs text editor we talked about here is still known as a free text editor.

Richard did not want to block access to the computers in the computer lab. The computer lab where Richard worked at the time was funded by DARPA. It is a government-affiliated security agency. Projects that were activated by it were able to log in through an account that was blocked or had a password. After introducing a password system like this in 1977, Richard invented a method to decode those passwords.

Richard then sent the passwords to the account holders in plain text and asked them to remove their passwords. This is because when you log in to the system through an account, you can identify who is logged in. Because anonymity is protected when you enter the system without such an account.

How the road to the GNU project was paved

The "hacker" culture began to collapse in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reason for this was that other competing software manufacturers competing with the software companies took their own software and modified it to their liking. Due to this competition, the release of the software code was gradually stopped. With the enactment of the United States Copyright Act in 1976, which enforces the copyright of the software, the emergence of free software began to be further restricted.

Richard firmly believed that if there was any software, the user should be able to change the code as they saw fit. You know, how much money software companies (like Windows) that came in as closed code without showing such code (like Windows) so which company would like to incur losses? Almost everyone at that time understood that closed code was the only way to make a profit.

Richard argues that if there is any software, it should allow the user to share it with their friends, study how it is made, and modify the code as they see fit. He was of the opinion that it was immoral to ban such things. His argument was not that all software should be provided for free. If there is any software, it means that it is not ethical to deprive the consumer of the freedom to consume freely.

Richard left MIT in February 1984 to devote his entire time to the GNU project, hoping to dedicate his entire time to free software. But as an unpaid, invited computer scientist, he maintained contacts with MIT.

GNU Project

In 1983, Richard informed those on the ARPANET and USENET mailing lists about a plan to build a GNU operating system based on his free theme.

In 1985, Richard published the GNU Policy Statement. It read about a free operating system called GNU. GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix. That means this OS is not Unix. Shortly thereafter, Richard started a non-profit organization called the Free Software Foundation, which began recruiting free software engineers and developing a legal framework for the free software business.

The GNU Licensing Act, which began with the legal basis for free software code modification and redistribution, first released a License in 1989 for the GNU Emacs General Public License as an Emacs editor.

Richard was developing one by one of the tools needed for an operating system. Those tools included Emacs editor, GCC Compiler, GNU Debugger, GNU make build Automator, and more. A major drawback to this list was the kernel. In 1990, members of the GNU Project launched a project called GNU Hurd using Carnegie Mellon's Mach microkernel. However, many improvements had to be made to comply with the POSIX standard, the UNIX operating system standard.

The birth of Linux

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, developed the well-known Linux kernel using GNU development tools.

As a result, the Linux platform was able to run computer programs already developed by GNU. The Linux kernel, a combination of GNU programs, is the common name for a commonly used operating system called "Linux". Richard and others did not like this, because the GNU, which laid the foundation for Linux, and the Free Software Foundation, were not represented there at all. Richard and other free software founders suggested the name GNU / Linux for Linux. Rarely do we see that in some places.