Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
Mathematical prodigy and gifted programmer, Richard Stallman is the initiator of the free software movement, software that is technically and legally free for others to use, study, modify and duplicate for distribution. The development of free software from the 1980s onwards changed the way we think about the use of computers.
Born with an autistic disorder that was diagnosed too late, Stallman had a complicated youth but quickly revealed himself as a mathematical genius. First selected by Harvard for a prestigious mathematics program, he then joined the AI Lab at MIT to develop his passion for cybernetics. He developed coding skills but above all a real "hacker ethic", that set of rules, explicit and implicit, of which the main one is that access to anything that could teach you something about the way the world works should be unlimited and total. For Stallman, code should therefore be open and modifiable by all.
He began to assert his social and political beliefs in the 1980s as Ronald Reagan began his conservative revolution in the United States. Stallman became increasingly concerned about the gradual disappearance of the hacker ethic, especially as the era coincided with the emergence of the technology companies Microsoft and Apple, which turned software into a commercial space.
Legend has it that Stallman's involvement took another turn in the 1980s when he found himself confronted with the chronic problem of paper jamming on a Xerox printer. While trying to improve the software that drove the printer, he was surprised to find that the source code was inaccessible to him. He realised that the era of computer scientists freely sharing their code on recorded tapes was coming to an end. In January 1984, he resigned from the AI Lab to embark on a crazy project: to offer the developer community an operating system without a paid license, which would be totally open and re-usable without conditions. The GNU program had just been launched and this almost desperate initiative - many developers thought it was unfeasible - was to take over the world and found the spirit and the main rules of open source.
A few years later, the birth of the Linux kernel - at the initiative of Linus Torvalds - allowed, by combining it with GNU tools, to form the GNU/Linux operating system. In a few decades, Linux has become a reference ecosystem because of the quality of its code, but also because of its governance. For the software community, using Linux is the guarantee of a much more complete and secure environment in the long term than proprietary software: in a context where security is a major concern, Linux is much faster than the competition to make the necessary changes when, for example, a security flaw is identified.
In short, convinced that computing would soon change the world and faced with the risk of institutions (companies or states) monopolising technologies, Richard Stallman has been leading a political battle in favour of free software for fifty years. In addition to being more efficient, collaboration prevents information technology from being hijacked for the benefit of a few. Helped by the development of Linux, the GNU project laid the foundations of open source, which is still the basis of a large community today.