Richard Matthew Stallman ( born March 16, 1953) is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License.
Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to write a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. With this, he also launched the free software movement. He has been the GNU project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including, among others, the GNU Compiler Collection,GNU Debugger, and GNU Emacs text editor.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify, and distribute free software. He is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license.
In 1989, he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management (which he refers to as digital restrictions management, calling the more common term misleading), and other legal and technical systems which he sees as taking away users' freedoms. This has included software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats, and binary executables without source code.
In September 2019, Stallman resigned as president of the FSF and left his "visiting scientist" role at MIT after making controversial comments about the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal. Stallman remained head of the GNU Project, and in 2021 returned to the FSF board of directors.
GNU Emacs manual pdf by Richard Stallman
Emacs is the premier text editor and programming environment for workstations and high-end PCs. This manual tells you how to get started with Emacs, how to write simple messages as well as complex documents, and how to use special modes for editing, compiling, and debugging programs. It also explains how to handle multiple files and directories and multiple windows, and how to customize your environment. GNU Emacs provides autosave, multiple undos and redos, transparent access to remote file systems, multiple backups, support for version control systems, and a Lisp interpreter. In addition, Emacs integrates make, grep, diff, and other utilities into a single environment. There are modes for programming in over a dozen different languages. Emacs not only works with plain character terminals but also is fully integrated with the X Window System. Emacs includes an on-line, easy to follow tutorial and a built-in help system that describes all of Emacs's features. This is the 13th edition of the GNU Emacs Manual. It is written by Richard M. Stallman, who wrote the original Emacs. This edition describes the new features and improvements in version 20. All funds raised from the sale of this book are used to support the development of free software and free documentation.