RICHARD M. STALLMAN

• 1969-70 Development of the Unix operating system begins at AT&T's Bell Laboratories.

Emacs period

• 1971 Stallman joins the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His job is to improve a computer operating system called ITS —Incompatible Time-Sharing System.
• 1974 Stallman got a magna cum laude degree in physics in Harvard (1970 to 1974).
• 1975 Cons Lisp machine was created by Greenblatt
• 1975 Emacs for Cons
• 1977 Symbilocs was formed
• 1979 Grennblatt left Symbolics over disagreements with Noftsker and forms LMI
• 1982-1983 Stallman helps LMI in its fight with Symbolics by reverse engineering Symbolics OS and put enhancements into LMI OS

Start of GNU project

• 1983 Stallman resigns from MIT to start the GNU project to write a free, Unix-like operating system. The name stands for GNU is Not Unix.
• 1984 Steven Levy "Hackers" book is published with a chapter devoted to RMS that presented him in an extremely favorable light.
• 1984 Stallman published a rewritten version of Emacs (GNU Emacs) as "free" software, and launches the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to support the GNU project. One of the first program he decided to write is a C compiler that became widely knows as gcc.

GCC period

• 1985 The first version of GCC was able to compile itself.
• 1985 GNU Manifesto published

GPL period

• 1989 FSF introduces a General Public License (GPL). GPL is also known as ' copyleft'.
• 1990 As the president of the League for Programming Freedom (organization that fight software patterns), Stallman is given a $240,000 fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
• 1991 ACM Grace Hopper Award for developing Emacs.
• 1991 Linus Torvalds started his development of Linux kernel.
• 1992 XEmacs fork. The first blow against RMS Bonaparte tendencies.
• 1994 First official Linux version 1.0 kernel released. Linux already has about 500,000 users.  Hurd efforts became doomed.

Development stalled. Political activism period

• 1996 Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, awards Stallman an honorary doctorate. Hurd is dead, XEmacs became more popular that Emacs.
• 1997 GCC fork. Second and more serious blow to the idea of FSF as the center of free software universe. FSF lost all its importance as a development center for free software. It's no longer a primary GCC maintainer, or XEmacs maintainer.
• 1997 Eric Raymond paper "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" was delivered at the Linux Congress 97 conference. Reformist, slightly anti-Stallman and anti-GNU open source movement was created. The term open source software largely replaced the term free software.
• 1997 Jihad against KDE  started.
• 1998 Netscape released the source code for Navigator on controversial terms. The event that was used by Eric Raymond to publicize an Open Source movement as distinct from GNU -- the movement that offers a much friendlier face to the business world, than FSF with its Anarchist view of intellectual property. .
• 1998 Stallman and Torvalds are given Pioneer awards by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Torvalds moved to the USA and gave in one year more interviews that for the rest of his life. As a public speaker he almost completely displaced RMS. Linux has approximately seven millions users. Intel and Netscape invested in Red Hat. The fight for GNU/Linux as a proper name of a combination of Linux kernel with GNU products is over: RMS lost it and the standard name remained just Linux.
• 1999  The year of Linux IPOs. Red Hat IPO produced first Linux millionaires like Robert Yong, Linus Torvalds, "surprised by wealth" Eric Raymond, and several others. RMS declined RH stock offering.
• 2000  GNU project converts into almost purely political organization without any significant development activities. Donation of SUN StarOffice to GPL became the largest GPLed project in history. It also eliminated weaker volunteer efforts to create a free alternative of MS Office. Radicalization of the RMS agenda. RMS critique of LGPL as inferior to GPL license.  Final stage of the jihad against KDE. Transmeta IPO signaled the end of Linux IPO wave. Linus Torvalds got an "undisclosed amount" of Transmeta stock. Jihad against KDE  ended by Qt adopting a GPL license. Gnome was adopted by Sun and other big Unix players as a new Unix standard desktop environment. Caldera acquired SCO Unix that became the first victim of Linux among proprietary Unix brands.
• 2001  The slide of stock market hurt Linux companies and almost eliminated prev. year "mass Linux enthusiasm" among investors. VA Linux and Transmeta lost their CEOs. Microsoft vice president Allchin pointed out that government sponsored software cannot be released under GPL and that GPL might stifle innovation. The draft of GPL v3 was released.