Sunday
Nov282004
Free as in Freedom - Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams
Sun 2004-11-28
A competent biography of the founder of the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation, and creator of GNU Emacs, GCC and the GNU General Public License (GPL). Stallman comes across as a prickly, awkward man with a mission. Of his work, the GNU EMACS editor system is now fast fading into antiquity, but the GCC compiler and the GPL are keystones of the GNU/Linux world. I think that the GPL will probably be what he is remembered for in the long run.
Sam Williams has placed a version of this book on-line at http://www.faifzilla.org. Also, Eric Raymond has some interesting things to say about this book at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/rms-bio.html.
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