Happy Birthday, Richard Stallman

    “Undoubtedly the greatest figure in hacker culture” by

    Eric Raymond about Richard Stallman

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    • The freedom to run the program for any purpose (freedom 0)
    • The freedom to study the structure of the program and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). This implies access to the source code of the program.
    • The freedom to distribute the program, having the opportunity to help others (freedom 2).
    • The freedom to improve the program and publish the improvements, in favor of the whole community (freedom 3). This implies access to the source code of the program.


    Today is the birthday of the “last true hacker,” Richard Stallman, “the eternal student”, software liberator and free software ideologist (not to be confused with Open Source Software ), creator of GNU, author of the concept of “copyleft”.

    Although Richard looks like an eccentric, the list of awards and contribution to the development of self-awareness and worldview of hackers of software developers is impressive.
    Awards
    • 1986: Honorary lifetime membership of the Chalmers University of Technology Computer Society
    • 1990: Exceptional merit award MacArthur Fellowship ("genius grant")
    • 1990: The Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award "For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros)"
    • 1996: Honorary doctorate from Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology
    • 1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award
    • 1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award
    • 2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social / Economic Well-Being (武田 研究 奨 励 賞)
    • 2001: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Glasgow
    • 2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership
    • 2003: Honorary doctorate, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
    • 2004: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Nacional de Salta
    • 2004: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú
    • 2007: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega
    • 2007: First Premio Internacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre
    • 2007: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote
    • 2007: Honorary doctorate, from the University of Pavia
    • 2008: Honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru
    • 2009: Honorary doctorate, from Lakehead University
    • 2011: Honorary doctorate, from National University of Córdoba
    • 2012: Honorary professorship, from the Universidad César Vallejo de Trujillo, in Peru
    • 2012: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad Latinoamericana Cima de Tacna, in Peru
    • 2012: Honorary doctorate, from the Universidad José Faustino Sanchez Carrió, in Peru
    • 2014: Honorary doctorate, from Concordia University, in Montréal



    I suggest using the right to read while it is.
    (under the cut - a collection of articles in Russian, one fun fact to crack passwords and the picture of the first computer Stallman)

    biography on Wikipedia .

    image
    At the age of 10-12, he read the manual for IBM 7094.

    At MIT, he was part of a hacker team that was finalizing and introducing new functionality into the operating system developed there. As he himself says in the Revolution OS documentary , the problems began when, succumbing to the influence of the outside world, it was necessary to enter passwords on computers.

    Stallman believed that security is a joke, and passwords are a way for administrators to control users. He found a way to decode passwords and sent an email to all users offering to refuse the password and just press Enter at the entrance to "restore anonymity".

    “I see that you have chosen the password [such and such]. I assume that you can switch to the "carriage return" password. It’s much easier to type, and this is in accordance with the principle that there should be no passwords. ”

    20% agreed.

    The computer science lab then installed a more complex password system on its computer. It was not easy for Stallman to break it, but Stallman had all the necessary abilities to study the encoding program, and as he later said: “I found that changing one command word in the program makes it possible to print your password on the system console, as part of the message, which you see when you log in. " Since the “system console” was visible to anyone passing by, and its messages could be easily accessed from any terminal, or even printed on paper, Stallman’s changes in the program made it easy to find out any password to anyone who was interested . Stallman himself believed that the result was "just amazing." [Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution ]

    Tales


    The right to read (a short fantastic story-prophecy)
    The danger of e-books
    Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, published an article on his website titled The Danger of E-books. In it, he compares printed and electronic books. So, for printed books it is typical:

    * You can buy in cash, anonymously;
    * You are not required to sign licenses that will limit you to use;
    * The format is known, patented technologies for reading a book are not required;
    * You can physically copy / scan books (and this is sometimes copyrighted);
    * No one has the right to destroy your book.

    Richard Stallman cites Amazon terms typical of e-book distribution:

    * The user needs to identify himself in order to receive the book;
    * The user may be required to accept restrictive licenses for the use of electronic books;
    * The format can be kept secret, and it is possible to work with it only using proprietary software;
    * Both software restrictions (DRM) and legal restrictions (licensing policy) may be imposed on copying books, which are often more significant than for traditional books;
    * Amazon can remotely delete a book (as, for example, in 2009, when thousands of copies of George Orwell's 1984 novel were deleted).

    Thus, e-books have much more limitations than printed ones. According to Richard Stallman, it is necessary to abandon their use until manufacturers respect the freedom of users. Although companies claim that a stronger restriction of user rights is necessary to support authors, in fact, such a copyright system is much better suited to support the companies themselves. There are other ways to support authors:

    * Distribute funds based on the "cubic root" of authors' popularity;
    * Provide the ability to send authors anonymous voluntary payments.
    [ original , source ]

    Genie Engineering
    "Made for You" (not in Russian)

    Articles


    The GNU manifesto
    The first publication in Russia about RMS. (1990)
    Why should programs not have hosts (1994)
    GNU and the free software movement (1999)
    Interview 18: Richard Stallman (2000)
    Freedom or slavery? Interview with Richard Stallman . (2004)
    Say "intellectual property"? Seductive Mirage (2004)
    Freedom, Innovation and Convenience: An Interview with Richard Stallman . (2004)
    At the
    Forefront with Richard Stallman (2007) “WHY GPLV3?” (2007)
    Translation of an article by Richard Stallman about the departure of Bill Gates from Microsoft (Habr, 2008)
    Stallman criticized the concept of cloud computing (2008) by
    Richard Stallman v. Web 2.0 (2008) by
    Richard Stallman. The great philosopher (Habr, 2009)
    "Biopiracy or bio-captivity?"
    Free from the word “freedom” (lenta.ru, transcript of Stallman’s lecture, December 3, 2011)
    Ryder Richard Stallman (Habr, 2011)
    I got angry and decided to build a world of freedom (Around the World Magazine, April 2012)
    “Do not trust Facebook, neither Google, nor Microsoft, nor Apple ” (MK, 2014)
    Richard Stallman’s lecture in Chisinau (Habr, 2014)
    Richard Stallman’s interview on Slashdot (2015)








    Together with Edison, we continue the spring publication marathon.

    I will try to get to the bottom of the source of IT-technologies, to figure out how they thought and what concepts were in the minds of the pioneers, what they dreamed about, how they saw the world of the future. Why did they think about “computer”, “network”, “hypertext”, “intelligence amplifiers”, “collective problem solving system”, what meaning they put into these concepts, what tools they wanted to achieve the result.

    I hope that these materials will serve as inspiration for those who are wondering how to go “from Scratch to Unit” (to create something that was not even mentioned before). I want IT and "programming" to cease to be just "coding for the bucket", and recall that they were conceived as a lever to changemethods of warfare, education, a way of joint activity, thinking and communication, as an attempt to solve world problems and respond to the challenges facing humanity. Something like this.

    March 0 Seymour Peypert
    March 1. Xerox Alto
    March 2 "Call Jake." History of NIC and RFC
    March 3 Grace “Granny COBOL” Hopper
    March 4 Margaret Hamilton: “Guys, I'll send you to the moon”
    March 5 Hedi Lamarr. And to shoot a movie in a naked movie and to shoot a torpedo at an enemy
    on March 7 The magnificent six: girls who counted a thermonuclear explosion
    on March 8 "Video games, I am your father!"
    9th of MarchHappy Birthday, Jeff Raskin
    March 14 Joseph “Lick” Liklider: “The Intergalactic Computer Network” and “The Symbiosis of Man and Computer”
    March 15 Vanivar Bush: “How We Can Think” (
    March 16 ) Happy Birthday, Richard Stallman

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