Z:gnu-www-ja-luispo-rms-interview--db2d71-Richard M. Stallman is the mos/en

Richard M. Stallman is the most forceful and famous practitioner/theorist of free software, a term he coined. &ldquo;Free&rdquo; here means free as in &ldquo;free speech,&rdquo; not free as in &ldquo;free beer.&rdquo; Stallman's most famous intervention in the &ldquo;free software&rdquo; movement has surely been the GNU General Public License (GPL), which Stallman created around 1985 as a general license that could be applied to any program. The license codifies the concept of &ldquo;copyleft,&rdquo; the &ldquo;central idea&rdquo; of which Stallman has described as giving &ldquo;everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions, but not permission to add restrictions of their own. Thus, the crucial freedoms that define &lsquo;free software&rsquo; are guaranteed to everyone who has a copy; they become inalienable rights&rdquo; (Stallman, &ldquo;The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement,&rdquo; in DiBona, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution )