2. The Prophet of Freedom Richard Stallman and the GNU Project

Hey there! Welcome back to Tech Bytes with Pratyay—your weekly shortcut to computer science on the go.

Last week, we explored the idea of Free Software—“free as in speech, not as in cost.” But ideas gain power when someone fights for them. Movements don’t appear out of nowhere; they’re sparked by individuals. Today, we’re meeting the brilliant, uncompromising, and controversial figure who ignited the free software revolution: Richard Stallman.

Pratyay: To understand modern technology, you need to understand Stallman. Not because he’s a CEO—he’s quite the opposite. He matters because his frustration in the 1980s sparked a global movement. He didn’t just dislike the rise of closed, proprietary software—he openly rebelled against it. Stallman became the philosophical architect of the free software world, and the tools he built still power the internet today.

Picture this: it’s the late 1970s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. Stallman—often called RMS—is working in what he saw as paradise. Code was open, shared, and constantly improved by everyone. It was true hacker culture.

But that culture began to disappear. Companies started locking down their software, hiding source code to protect profits. For Stallman, the breaking point came with something ordinary—a printer.

The lab received a new printer that kept jamming. Stallman, being a skilled programmer, wanted to fix the bug in its software. But the manufacturer refused to share the source code. It was proprietary—a secret. That moment changed everything. He realized users were losing control over the technology they relied on.

In 1983, he decided to fight back. He announced a plan to build an entirely free operating system—an alternative to the proprietary Unix systems dominating at the time. He called it GNU, short for “GNU’s Not Unix.”

Stallman didn’t just write code; he built a movement. He founded the Free Software Foundation and wrote a groundbreaking legal document: the GNU General Public License, or GPL.

The GPL was a clever legal twist—it used copyright law, usually meant to restrict sharing, to guarantee it instead. Any software licensed under the GPL, and any derivative of it, must remain free forever. We’ll explore how that works in a future episode.

With the philosophy and legal foundation in place, the GNU Project started building the core components of a free system: the GCC compiler, the Emacs editor, and the Bash shell. Piece by piece, Stallman and his community were creating a complete operating system.

By the early 1990s, only one major piece was missing: the kernel—the core that connects software to hardware. GNU’s kernel, HURD, was taking longer than expected to develop.

And then history took a perfect turn. All of Stallman’s GNU tools—the compiler, the editor, the shell—were ready, waiting for a kernel to bring them to life. In 1991, a student in Finland provided exactly that.

(Outro music fades in gently)

Pratyay: Wrapping up—Richard Stallman is the founder of the free software movement. His frustration with a printer led to the creation of the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, and the license that still protects software freedom today.

That’s your byte-sized note from Tech Bytes with Pratyay. Today, we explored the story of a man whose ideas quietly shaped the technology you use every day.

Next week, we’ll break down the four essential freedoms of software—the specific rights Stallman fought to defend.

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