[Falkirk] RMS talk in Edinburgh. The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System

[Jonathan Riddell]

Richard Stallman gives his Free Software talk in Edinburgh

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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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