Richard Stallman is an American programmer and a stalwart of the free software movement. Known to fellow hackers at MIT’s AI Lab as ‘rms’ or ‘RMS’, he worked on various projects like Emacs, TECO, and the LISP machine operating system (the CONS and the CADR). As a staunch advocate of the free software movement, he believes that any software copy should give the user the freedom to use, study, modify and distribute that copy. He quit his job at MIT to launch the GNU project, with the objective of creating a free operating system composed entirely of free software. He also founded the FSF (Free Software Foundation) which currently serves as an online library for tons of free software, created and contributed, by programmers from around the world. He pioneered the ‘copyleft’ concept and authored ‘free software licenses’. In fact, GPL or GNU General Public License which is based on the same principles is the most widely used free software license across the world. He has spent a great many years campaigning against digital practices like digital rights management, software patents and license agreements, proprietary formats, activation keys and copy restrictions.