Richard Stallman of the Free Software Movement at Holy Cross

Free software advocate Richard M. Stallman will deliver a lecture on Wednesday, April 18, at 3:30 p.m. in Room 112 of O'Neil Hall. Stallman's lecture, titled "The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System," is free and open to the public.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (GNUs Not Unix). GNU is software that everyone is free to copy, redistribute and change. Today, Linux-based variants of the GNU system are in widespread use, with an estimated 20 million users. Stallman is the principal author of the GNU C Compiler, the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB), GNU Emacs and various other GNU programs.

While an undergraduate student at Harvard University, Stallman worked as a staff hacker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor in 1975. Nine years later, he resigned from MIT and started the GNU Project.

The recipient of the Grace Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, Stallman was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and in 1999 he received the Yuri Rubinski Award.

Stallman’s visit is sponsored by the math and computer science department.