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Consulting

The GNU Project
and
The GNU / LINUX System

by Dr. Richard Stallman

on Tuesday 23rd March, 1999 at 7.00 p.m. - 9.00 p.m.

The Commonwealth Institute
Commonwealth Conference and Events Centre
Kensington High Street
London W8 6NQ

Richard Stallman will speak about the goals, philosophy, history, methods, status and future plans of the GNU Project, which started in 1984 to develop a free software operating system compatible with Unix. GNU/Linux, a modified version of this operating system that uses Linux as the kernel, is now used by millions of people.

Biography: Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for "GNU's Not Unix"), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. Today, Linux-based variants of the GNU system, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are in widespread use. There are estimated to be over 10 million users of GNU/Linux systems today.

Richard Stallman is the principal author of the GNU C Compiler, a portable optimizing compiler which was designed to support diverse architectures and multiple languages. The compiler now supports over 30 different architectures and 7 programming languages. He also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB), GNU Emacs, and various other GNU programs. He received the Grace Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for 1991 for his development of the first Emacs editor in the 1970s. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award along with Linus Torvalds.

PLEASE NOTE

There is no charge for this evening presentation and pre-booking is not necessary.