In 1984, a programmer quit his job at MIT without a backup plan, without investors, and without a salary. His reason? He was done watching companies lock down code that used to be shared freely among

Repartage — contenu de Jolanda de Koff

In 1984, a programmer quit his job at MIT without a backup plan, without investors, and without a salary. His reason? He was done watching companies lock down code that used to be shared freely among programmers

This is Richard Stallman, and he started the free software movement

Back in the early 80s, Stallman was working at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, surrounded by brilliant programmers who shared everything. Someone wrote a cool piece of code? The others could use it and improve on it. That was how things worked back then

Then corporations moved in. Suddenly, there were licenses, restrictions, and software you weren't allowed to look inside. Stallman had modified the lab's old printer to send a message when it jammed. When a new Xerox printer arrived in 1980, he wanted to add the same feature, but the source code was locked

He announced GNU in 1983. The name is a nerdy programmer joke, it stands for "GNU's Not Unix." But what does the G in GNU stand for? Also GNU. It refers to itself, over and over again. Recursive humor, love that stuff. His goal was to build a complete operating system that would stay free forever. Free as in freedom, the way he meant it: the freedom to run it, study it, share it, and modify it however you want

It sounded crazy at the time. Why work for free when software had started making serious money?

→ In 1985, he founded the Free Software Foundation

→ In 1990, he received the MacArthur "Genius Grant" worth $240,000

→ His compiler GCC and other GNU tools became the foundation that Linus Torvalds used to build Linux

→ In 1999, he called for a free online encyclopedia written by the public, two years before Wikipedia launched

→ In 2006, he convinced the Indian state of Kerala to move 12,500 high schools from Windows to GNU/Linux

→ In 2013 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame

The guy who quit his comfortable MIT job to fight for software freedom ended up shaping the tech industry. What we call "Linux" today is GNU and Linux combined, which is why he calls it GNU/Linux. Without his philosophy, the open source movement would look very different today

He's 73 now and still giving talks about software freedom. In January, he spoke at Georgia Tech. We owe him a lot. When you use Linux, change open source code or read the source of the software you run, you're using freedoms this man started fighting for over 40 years ago

He gave up a safe job for an idea. That idea runs the internet now

The ls, cat and chmod you type in a Linux terminal come from GNU

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📸 Photo: Tania Victoria / Secretaría de Cultura CDMX (CC BY-SA 2.0)

#ethicalhacking #linux #gnu #richardstallman #freesoftware #opensource #programming #cybersecurity

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Sources LinkedIn

• Profil : Pierre Jean Duvivier dit Sage (LinkedIn)
• Auteur partagé : Jolanda de Koff (LinkedIn)