Richard Stallman. View of Richard Stallman, programmer and head of the Free Software Foundation. Beginning his career as a programmer and hacker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, he founded the GNU Project in 1984. This had the aim of developing a computer operating system which everyone was free to use, modify and distribute. The result of this project was the GNU/Linux system, which was thought to be used by over 10 million people by the middle of the 1990s. In 1998 he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, along with Linus Torvalds, the developer of the Linux system. Photographed in 1999.