BANGALORE: The bustling, overcrowded gullies of Sudarshan Layout’s slum settlement played host to a very high-profile visitor on Saturday afternoon. American software freedom activist, and founder of the GNU Project and Free Software Foundation Richard Matthew Stallman, fondly known as RMS, sat down to tea and interacted with children and volunteers at the Ambedkar Community Computing Centre.

"Richard Stallman, widely acknowledged at the pioneer of the free software movement, visits local community computer centre and gets impressed..."

"Richard Stallman, Founder of GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, inaugurated the Centre for Excellence in E-governance in Department of Management Studies,Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi on Thursday, December 18, 2008 as part of 6th International Conference on E-governance (December 18-20, 2008)..." --

Richard M. Stallman, founder of Free Software Movement will be visiting the Sri Jayachamarajendra college of Engineering...

I have interviewed Richard Stallman and other members of the Free Software Foundation often enough that he remembers my name (no small feat, I’m sure, considering the hundreds he meets each year). Once or twice, I think, in talking about parrots and folk music, I may have caught a personal glimpse of him. But, even if I haven’t, I generally support the Free Software Foundation.

"...While proprietary software companies are like the colonial rulers who exploited the masses, free software is freedom and liberation. Ambedkar Community Computer center is a model for the other parts of the india in such a way that it gives access to computers for the poor without compromising the freedom.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has just released in tandem the second edition of its president and founder Richard Stallman's selected essays, Free Software, Free Society, and his semi-autobiography, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution.

"Richard Stallman, otherwise known as rms or the founder of the free software movement, will be in town for a series of lectures at UBC and BCIT. I have been reading Stallman’s stuff since I wrote my master’s thesis in 2003. Although sometimes passed off as a crank, much of Stallman’s work has proven accurate, insightful and even prescient over the years.

"In February of last year, Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, spoke at the International Conference on Communication and Technologies in Havana about what he strongly believes are the merits of non-proprietary software. I recently learned directly from Stallman what that experience was like.