Richard Stallman: A monk living in the ideal life

Article title: Richard Stallman: A monk living in an ideal life. Linux is a technology channel of the IT lab in China. Includes basic categories such as desktop applications, Linux system management, kernel research, embedded systems, and open source.

(Richard Matthew Stallman, RMS), born in 1953, is a freelance Software hacker and activist. founder and chairman of the Free Software Foundation, founder of the GNU project, and academician of the American engineering institute, author of GNU General Public License (gnu gpl), Zeuux consultant. Stallman is known as "the last real hacker ".

Richard Stallman is the principal author of GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). He also developed GNU Symbolic Debugger, GNU Emacs and many other GNU software. He has won numerous awards, including the Association for Computing Machinery Grace Murray Hopper Award, MacArthur Foundation fellowship Award, and Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award, takeda Award for Social/economical Betterment and several honorary doctorate titles.

The original computer, like the Abacus invented by our predecessors, was a pure mechanical device with only hardware and no software. Until the middle of the 20th century, with the invention of electronic tubes and transistors, the electronic components of computers surpassed the mechanical components and gradually evolved into the current electronic computer. in this process, software emerged, and play an increasingly important role, and eventually become the soul of the computer. In the original software world, of course, there was no concept of free software, proprietary software, and open-source software, because software was born to be free, and the company attached software to the hardware sold, including source code and documentation. People modify software according to their own needs, use hardware freely, and share and collaborate with each other. The classic story about this is Richard Stallman's "printer driver", which vividly shows the impact of software's natural freedom on people's lives.

At Harvard University, Richard Stallman began to work at the mit ai Lab and became part of the programmer community. everyone shared software and worked together to increase human knowledge, this is part of life. Richard Stallman experienced deep pain. In 1970s, when Xerox (Xerox) sent an image laser printer to the AI lab, it was found that only on the ninth floor of the AI Lab, to locate the location. All people in the building need to give instructions on their computers to ask the printer to help you. The printing speed is satisfactory, but sometimes the printing speed of a lot of people stops when the paper is printed or clipped. Sometimes some people need to print a lot of things, while some people only need to print one or two sheets, they have to climb the ninth floor and change the control of the printer so that they can print one or two pieces first. As a result, no one can afford to climb down like this in one day. Fortunately, when the printer was sent, Xerox randomly attached the source code of the driver, and the lab staff made some modifications to the function of controlling the printer driver, saving a lot of trouble and sweat. Richard Stallman recalled: "After your printing is done, it will notify you. if you have a piece of paper or want to ask something about printing, it will also let you know."

Everything changed in 1978. Xerox sent a new printer named Dover to the AI lab, but did not want to attach the source code. Richard Stallman said: "So we can't modify the driver, so the printing efficiency of the whole building is back to the past. if we get stuck in paper or print out paper, you won't know it either ." He and the AI Lab added functionality to the printer so that the machine could work better and wanted the source code of the printer control program, and the results were severely rejected. "Therefore, I can no longer convince myself that no public agreement is pure and innocent. I was very angry when they refused to share it with us. I cannot change things more easily and do the same thing to others ."

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