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ABOUT

Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman (b. 1953) is an American software freedom activist and programmer who studied at Harvard and MIT. He campaigns for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project in 1983, founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public 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, and other legal and technical systems which he sees as taking away users' freedoms, including software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats and binary executables without source code. As of 2016, he has received fifteen honorary doctorates and professorships and is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990.

Stallman professes admiration for whistleblowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden; he advocates for Snowden in his email signature, which can be found in several mailing lists, after Snowden leaked the PRISM scandal in 2013: To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example.

Stallman's campaign against software patents, digital rights management, software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats and binary executables without source code apllies in a general way to fonts if fonts are indeed software (they are not, in my opinion). But they do come with software-style licenses and they are binary executables. Stallman argues in some of his work for reduced copyright---about ten years. I especially applaud his stance on binary formats (like truetype or opentype). Fonts should be available in source code format, readable by ordinary people, and that format should not be proprietary---in other words, neither truetype, nor type 1 nor opentype.

Wikipedia link.

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INTERNAL LINKS
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