Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated rms (lower case), is a software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU project he started the free software movement, and in October 1985 set up the Free Software Foundation. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.[4] Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger.

Early years
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the hacker culture that Stallman thrived in began to fragment. To prevent software from being used on their competitors' computers, most manufacturers stopped distributing source code and began using copyright and restrictive software licenses to limit or prohibit copying and redistribution. Such proprietary software had existed before, and it became apparent that it would become the norm. This shift in the legal characteristics of software can be regarded as a consequence triggered by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, as stated by Stallman's MIT fellow Brewster Kahle. He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons — pragmatic for example: because it may lead to improved software.
In January 1984, Stallman quit his job at MIT to work full-time on the GNU project, which he had announced in September 1983. He did not complete a Ph.D. but has been awarded six honorary degrees (see list below).

MIT's hacker culture declines

Main article: GNU project Activism
Stallman places great importance on the words and labels people use to talk about the world, including the relationship between software and freedom. He untiringly asks people to say "free software", "GNU/Linux", and to avoid the term "intellectual property". His requests that people use certain terms, and his ongoing efforts to convince people of the importance of terminology, are a source of regular mis-understanding and friction with parts of the free and open source software community.
One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the journalist agree to use his terminology throughout their article., but Stallman's term is not widely used.
Avoiding "piracy" for the act of copying information, arguing that "piracy" has always designated the act of robbery or plunder at sea, and that the term is misused by corporations to lend a greater importance to the act of copying software or other intangible things.
"Corrupt discs" or "Fake CDs" to describe digital audio compact discs which employ Copy Control or other similar technology to prevent copying, arguing that they break the Red Book standard and noting that recently such discs are printed without the Compact Disc logo.
"Treacherous Computing" rather than "Trusted Computing", which limits the freedoms of users by denying them the ability to control their computers.
"Website Revision System (WRS)" as a replacement for "Content management system (CMS)" arguing that:
Stallman refers to "Digital Restrictions Management" (DRM) rather than "Digital Rights Management", because DRM is designed to limit what the user can do, not grant the user more rights. He also suggests calling it "handcuffware", a term which has not caught on in English. The Free Software Foundation has started the "Defective by Design" campaign in response to these issues. Terminology
By all accounts, including his own,

Personal life
Stallman has received the following recognition for his work:

1986: Honorary life time membership of the Chalmers Computer Society
1990: Receives the exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship
1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award "For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)."
2004: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú.
2005: Fundazione Pistoletto prize. Recognition

Stallman, Richard M. & Sussman, Gerald J. (November 1975). Heuristic Techniques in Computer-Aided Circuit Analysis, published in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Vol. CAS-22 (11)
Stallman, Richard M. & Sussman, Gerald J. (1977). Forward Reasoning and Dependency-Directed Backtracking In a System for Computer-Aided Circuit analysis, published in Artificial Intelligence 9 pp.135-196
Stallman, Richard M. (1981). EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Self-Documenting Display Editor. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT. MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory publication AIM-519A. Also available over the web in HTML and PDF formats.
Stallman, Richard M. (2002). GNU Emacs Manual: Fifteenth edition for GNU Emacs Version 21. Boston, Massachusetts: GNU Press. ISBN 1-882114-85-X. Also available over the web in different formats.
Gay, Joshua (ed) (2002): Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Boston, Massachusetts: GNU Press. ISBN 1-882114-98-1. Also available over the web in PDF, Texinfo, and Postscript formats
Williams, Sam (2002): Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software. ISBN 0-596-00287-4.
Stallman, Richard; McGrath, Roland; & Smith, Paul D. (2004). GNU Make: A Program for Directed Compilation. Boston, Massachusetts: GNU Press. ISBN 1-882114-83-3. Also available over the web in different formats. See also

stallman.org, Richard Stallman's personal homepage.
Stallman's weblog of his travels
Stallman's political and human rights related commentary and an RSS-feed of the same.
Essays on the GNU philosophy pages, mostly by Stallman, on the free software movement
Essays on the FSF essays page
The original GNU announcement