The origin of Richard Stallman and the free software ideas he developed is from a time before computers became an integral part of ordinary people’s lives, the 70s. Many decades before our cell phones tracked our every movement, before smart homes brought mass surveillance into our living rooms, the idea of computers as serious tools of oppression seemed patently absurd.
Stallman was different. He detested and feared users’ loss of control of computing. To combat what he viewed as an unacceptable loss of users’ fundamental freedoms in proprietary software, Stallman formulated and then stuck by free software principles. By the early 80s, Stallman had founded the free software movement and become one of its most prolific contributors through his programming of the GNU operating system, whose goal was to be entirely free/libre software. He campaigned and coded for free software unpaid while his computer-science peers of lesser talents made millions.
Stallman’s following grew as his dire, crazy-sounding rantings of the early 80s have largely come true. So much so that there is now an international Free
— source wetheweb.org | Hannah Wolfman-Jones | May 11, 2020