Richard Stallman (rms)
termops cultureprogramming
The MIT AI Lab hacker who, watching the lab's culture dissolve into proprietary software in the early 1980s, launched the GNU Project in 1983, founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, and wrote the four freedoms and the GPL.
The origin story is a printer: denied the source code to fix a jam notification, he concluded that a program you cannot change is a program that controls you. He then wrote foundational software - GCC, GNU Emacs, GDB, much of the toolchain the world compiles with - which is why the argument had teeth. Uncompromising to the point of alienating allies, and controversial in later years over public remarks, he remains the reason the movement is framed as ethics rather than engineering convenience.
Also known as: rms, gnu, fsf founder, st ignucius