On Friday 17 January 2003 11:50 pm, sameer shinde wrote:
<P>Who is RMS? Some details about him.</P> <P>& why is he comming to India...</P>
I am assuming that you are asking a question. Based on this assumption, I will answer. RMS refers to the person called Richard Stallman. He was founder of the GNU movement(A movement to create a UNIX like FREE(as in freedom - he coined this phrase( Operating system ). Just FYI, the GNU movement was started far before Linus even dreamt about writing Linux. He is still looked upon as a cult figure and revered in programming circles. Some accomplishments to his name include gdb and gcc. He is also the person who drafted the great GPL. A little histroy about him. He was born to jewish parents in New York, and from childhood was a very principled and introverted kid. He completed his college education as Harvard where he majored in mathematics. During his stay at Harvard, in the 1970s(iirc) he used to work at the AI lab in MIT (they are very close). Because he did a good job hacking at the AI lab, he secured employment there after his undergraduate studies. Here he, and fellow hackers, used to work merrily on a PDP-10. Most software then was used for research purposes. Historically, mathematics and the sciences have fostered sharing of knowledge without a price. Hence the software was shared with the same spirit. However, time would change it all. By the early 1980s, as computer applications to everyday life increased, most of the software available was proprietary. Even operating systems! The number of hackers at the AI lab dwindled owing to the market power and monetary strength of companies like AT&T, Xerox etc. As if in answer to all this, Stallman wrote his own C compiler which later came to be known as gcc. The seed for the GNU movement was sown by an unhappy incident over a printer driver. A Xerox printer in the AI lab stopped functioning properly. Hacker that he was, Stallman stepped up to fix it. But much to his dismay, he found that the drivers provided were binary only. This infuriated Stallman. He formally announced the beginning of the GNU movement in this (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html) post to net.unix-wizards. These days he is busy advocating the ethical justifications, rather, reasons, to use Free Software. I presume that's why he is coming to India.
P.S - Stallman also wrote his own Operating system which came with it's own games, newsreader, filemanager and other tricks. It's only shortcoming was the lack of a good editor. Guessed its name?. Right on, Emacs :) (Sorry all emacs lovers, i had to do this for my Vi friends)