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Informatics Colloquium
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/colloquium/
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The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System
3pm, Thursday 27 May 2004 George Square Lecture Theatre Edinburgh
Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide.
About Richard Stallman (http://www.stallman.org)
Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free software operating system GNU. The name 'GNU' is a recursive acronym for 'GNU's Not Unix'.
Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975. He also developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project.
He is the principal author of the GNU Compiler Collection, a portable optimizing compiler which was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30 different architectures and 7 programming languages. Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.
Stallman received the Grace Hopper award for 1991 from the Association for Computing Machinery, for his development of the first Emacs editor. In 1990 he was awarded a Macarthur foundation fellowship, and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the royal institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's pioneer award along with Linus Torvalds. In 1999 he received the Yuri Rubinski award. In 2001 he received a second honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow, and shared the Takeda award for social/economic betterment with Torvalds and Ken Sakamura. In 2002 he was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering, and in 2003 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 he was named an honorary professor of the Universided Nacional de Ingenieria in Peru, and received an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels.
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