1. 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. 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. Stallman also wrote the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB), GNU Emacs, and various other GNU programs. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux