Richard Stallman

Richard M. Stallman (RMS) is the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the brains behind the GNU operating system, a Unix workalike (see also Linux). Stallman was part of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s, where he did a lot of creative computer programming (which he and his friends called "hacking").

He conceived of the notion of "free software" being formally licensed as an alternative to the public domain, thus forming a worldwide community of programmers and software users who can all equally share the benefits of new and improved software donated to the community.