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As a high-school student, Stallman worked at the IBM New York Scientific Center during the summer, writing Fortran code and experimenting with editors and preprocessors.
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While starting at Harvard, Stallman became a programmer at the MIT AI Lab and joined the hacker community that freely shares source code.
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Stallman completed his bachelor’s degree in physics at Harvard University, while still spending most of his time at MIT’s AI Lab. -
At MIT, Stallman Gerald Jay Sussman researched on dependency-directed backtracking (truth maintenance), contributing to early AI reasoning systems. -
He wrote the Emacs text editor in the C computer programming language with James Gosling (who later developed Java). -
When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password, with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to re-enable anonymous access to the systems. Around 20 percent of the users followed his advice at the time, although passwords ultimately prevailed. -
When Brian Reid in 1979 placed time bombs in the Scribe markup language and word processing system to restrict unlicensed access to the software, Stallman proclaimed it "a crime against humanity". -
For two years, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman worked by himself to clone the output of the Symbolics programmers, with the aim of preventing them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers.
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In 1983 Stallman began working in his personal time on his GNU Project, or GNU operating system. GNU was intended to be a free version of ATT’s UNIX -
Stallman resigns his paid job at MIT so he can work on the GNU Project full-time and avoid conflicts over software ownership. -
In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. -
Soon after he released GNU Manifesto, he started a nonprofit corporation called the Free Software Foundation to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. Stallman was the nonsalaried president of the FSF, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in Massachusetts. -
For his early work on free software and influence on hacker culture.
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Stallman popularized the concept of copyleft, a legal mechanism to protect the modification and redistribution rights for free software. It was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License, and in 1989 the first program-independent GNU General Public License (GPL) was released. -
The FSF publishes GNU GPL v1, written by Stallman, which introduces a strong copyleft license requiring modified versions to remain free. -
For founding the GNU Project and pushing a new idea of software freedom; the MacArthur Foundation highlighted how his work let users study, modify, and share programs. He received this award. -
For his “pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS,” which became a powerful, programmable text editor central to hacker culture. -
After Linus Torvalds releases the Linux kernel (0.01) on 17 September 1991, developers combine it with GNU tools to create complete free operating systems often called “Linux” or “GNU/Linux.” -
In 1992, developers at Lucid Inc. doing their own work on Emacs clashed with Stallman and ultimately forked the software into what would become XEmacs. -
For launching the GNU Project and creating the legal/philosophical foundation for free software as an issue of user rights, not just convenience. -
In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free online encyclopedia through the means of inviting the public to contribute articles. The resulting GNUPedia was eventually retired in favour of the emerging Wikipedia, which had similar aims and was enjoying greater success. -
He received this award for promoting free software and free access to code, which supports an open, non-proprietary web.
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Stallman continued traveling, giving talks, and writing about free software, software patents, and user freedom. He receives multiple awards and remains a symbolic leader of the free software movement to this date.
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What it is: A Japanese prize recognizing technology that improves social or economic well-being. Why he got it: Because free software gives users and organizations worldwide a way to use and improve powerful software without licensing fees, which has big social and economic impact.
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He got this award for starting the GNU project, which produced influential, non-proprietary software tools, and for founding the free software movement.
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This award is for creating free development tools (GNU, GCC, etc.) and the free software model that underpins much of the internet infrastructure.
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GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), which became a standard compiler suite used to build huge amounts of free and proprietary software. ACM notes that GCC has “enabled extensive software and hardware innovation” and is a “lynchpin of the free software movement.”
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Why he got it: For promoting free software as a tool that supports health and social projects, showing that software freedom matters beyond just tech people.