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Richard Stallman was born in New York, New York 1953 (Hosch), -
In 1971, while getting his degree in physics at Harvard, Richard Stallman worked at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT (Hosch). Here he would be the last of the hackers that kept up the original hacker ethic (Levy).
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In 1974, Richard Stallman graduated from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in physics (Hosch). -
Developed dependency-directed backtracking, used for AI (Internet Hall of Fame).
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While at MIT, Stallman created the EMACS program. EMACS was the standard text editor at MIT's computer science department. The program was given out on the condition that people would add to it (Levy).
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Richard Stallman founded the free software movement with the announcement of GNU project. The goal of the free software movement was to free everyone from the limitations of proprietary software (Isaacson).
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The development of GNU begins as Richard Stallman leaves MIT due to the university's changes on their copyright (Hosch). Stallman decided it would be very similar to UNIX, which was the standard at the time (Isaacson). -
Stallman begins distributing GNU EMACS. This was done through an FTP connection or a $150 package he would send in order to pay his bills (Bretthauer). -
Stallman would establish the Free Software Foundation, with the goal of promoting free software and GNU (Hosch). It was also promoting the freedom to change and share software (Bretthauer). -
The GNU Debugger or GBD was created by Stallman for the GNU project. It is still updated to this day and improved upon (Contributors). -
The GNU Compiler was made by Stallman. It was originally made for just the GNU operating system. It supports multiple programming languages and falls under Free Software Foundation's ideals. It is still used and updated to this day (A Brief History of GCC). -
Created by Stallman, copyleft is the term used for the licensing agreement for the GNU General Public License. It works by making the copylefted code able to be modifiable so long as the distribution terms are not changed (Bretthauer). -
Stallman received this award which gave him a "genius grant". This allowed him to continue more work on GNU and allow more utilities for the operating system (Hosch).
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GNU was almost complete and all it had left was a kernel. Linus Torvalds released the Linux Kernel which was combined with GNU and it is now one of the most powerful operating systems (Bretthauer). -
The Free Universal Encyclopedia was a paper made by Stallman proposing an encyclopedia that was free and open-source (Hosch). This proposition would lead into the creation of Nupedia and then Wikipedia (Isaacson). -
While Stallman has no direct connection to Creative Commons, his activism and Free Software Foundation inspired Creative Commons. Most of the licensing ideas came from the Freedom Software Foundation (Lessig).