Richard Stallman likes computers, music and butterflies---among other things.
![[image of rms playing recorder to a butterfly that is visiting the computer room]](/web/19990117094458im_/http://www.gnu.org/people/rms-icon.jpg){kind=icon}
(jpeg 2k)
(jpeg 64k)
We also have a black-and-white photograph of rms as a
5820K Encapsulated Postscript file,
a 3762K JPEG file, and a
5815K TIFF file.
Stallman is also a saint in the Church of Emacs---Saint IGNUcius.
I bless your computer, my child!
(jpeg 31k, photo by Wouter van Oortmerssen)
Sainthood in the Church of Emacs requires living a life of purity---but in the Church of Emacs, this does not require celibacy (a sigh of relief is heard). Being holy in our church means installing a wholly free operating system--GNU/Linux is a good choice--and not putting any non-free software on your computer. You too can be a saint!
In addition to a saint, the Church of Emacs also has a hymn--the Free Software Song. (No gods yet, though.)
Saint IGNUcius says: Some people don't realize that Saint IGNUcius is a way of not taking myself too seriously. Therefore,
A serious bio
Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for ``GNU's Not Unix''), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small.
Today, Linux-based variants of the GNU system, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are in widespread use. There are estimated to be over 10 million users of GNU/Linux systems today.
Richard Stallman is the principal author of the GNU C Compiler, 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 GNU programs.
Stallman received the Grace Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for 1991 for his development of the first Emacs editor in the 1970s. 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.
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