RMIT Computer Science Seminar
11.30am, Friday 30th April 1999
RMIT City Campus
Ethel Osborne Hall
Building 13, Level C
This is a Two Hour seminar
Freedomware: The GNU/Linux Operating System
Richard Stallman
Abstract
Richard Stallman will speak about the goals, philosophy, methods, history,
current status and future aims of the GNU Project. Variants of the GNU
operating system, based on Linux as the kernel, are now used by an estimated
ten million users.
Brief 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.
Sam Makki