"NEW DELHI: Imagine a world free of patents and passwords, of copyrights and copycats, of freedom to create. Imagine a world full of free software. That’s the world of Richard Stallman , tech guru, hacker, political activist, pioneer of concepts like Copyleft, digital colonisation and maker of GNU compiler and debugger of GNU/Linux operating system.

As founder president of Free Software Foundation, Dr Stallman, 55, has managed to convince governments like Kerala and companies like ATI (now AMD) to switch to the idea of free software. ET caught up with the legendary Richard Matthew Stallman (called RMS by hackers) on his visit to India to understand his idea of a free world of technology. Excerpts..."

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.

It appears to be open season for launching attacks on the head of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Matthew Stallman, the man who is in large measure responsible for the status that free and open source software enjoys today.

"Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often abbreviated "rms",[1] is an American software freedom activist, hacker,[2] and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project[3] to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer.

"Double appointment Italy next week for Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation..."

"Richard M. Stallman (Founder of GNU Project and Free Software Foundation) is coming down to SJCET Palai for a seminar in connection with Swathanthra 1.0 a one day free Software fest on Thursday, September 9, 2010..."

Fashion is fickle. One day thin clients and clusters are the fashion de jour, the next it's Web 2.0, Virtualisation or distributed computing and Grids. They who live by the sword of fashion will surely perish by it but a new model has been strutting its stuff along the catwalk of web fashion and she goes by the name of Cloud Computing.

"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.

"One of the more interesting aspects of the modern knowledge society is the free software movement. The most famous and influential leader of this movement is Richard M. Stallman (RMS). Richard recognized the value of a new model for software development and the various risks to that model.