Richard Stallman: The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System

On Tuesday evening, March 17, at 6:30pm, Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide. We shall be meeting at the Crown Center Auditorium, at 1001-25 West Loyola Avenue, Chicago. This will be a joint event with the Loyola University Computer Science Department, who will be providing us with our meeting room.

Location information: the building entrance is from the south side rather than the side abutting the street; go up the stairs and bear right inside the building. More information and pictures are at http://www.luc.edu/campus_reservations/crowncenter.shtml. The nearest public transportation is the Loyola red line station or adjacent bus stop, which is served by the 155 and 147 buses; the 36 and 151 buses also service the area. There is a parking garage (P1 on campus map) charging $7. The Loyola University Lake Shore Campus map is accessible at http://www.luc.edu/visit.shtml.

Note the change in location — since we are expecting a larger turnout than we normally have at our events, we were obliged to secure a different, and larger, meeting location than the downtown location where we usually meet.

Dr. Richard Stallman launched the free software movement in 1983 and started the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, with or without changes. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, and the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several doctorates honoris causa, and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

There are several mailing lists maintained by the Free Software Foundation; if you want to receive electronic mail, on an ongoing basis, informing you of other Free Software Foundation events in Illinois, you can put yourself on their mailing lists at https://crm.fsf.org/civicrm/profile/create?gid=73&reset=1. Also, if any of you want to record or live-stream the talk (the Chicago C/C++ Users' Group will not be doing either, but we don't mind if you do), please let me know (jay at m5 dot chicago dot il dot us), because the Free Software Foundation will want to talk to you about distributing your recording, or advertising your live stream.

Eagle 7, who generously provided pizza and beer for our meeting last month, will be providing pizza and non-alcoholic [1] beer for our March 17 meeting also. Prior to the meeting, we shall be taking Dr Stallman to dinner (normally we do not take our speakers to dinner, but Dr Stallman is flying in from Massachusetts, so he will be unable to go home after his presentation). If you want to join Dr Stallman for dinner, please contact me directly to discuss it (jay at m5 dot chicago dot il dot us, or 410/9964737) — the number of people who can come to dinner with Dr Stallman will, obviously, be limited.

Loyola University is serious about not serving alcohol to underage college students, so we shall have to listen to Dr. Stallman sober.

Dr Stallman insists that people be able to attend his speeches without being required to give their names, or show identification. However, Eagle 7 would like to know, roughly, how many people are coming, so that they will know how much food and drink to bring. If they are expecting too few people, we may run out of pizza and beer, and surely no one wants that to happen. And, of course, if we have booked a room that is too small for the crowd, we will want to know, so that we can get a larger room (just imagine what it would have been like if we hadn't known in advance how many people were coming to the Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter event).

In keeping with Dr Stallman's wishes, registration for this event is optional, but if you tell us that you are coming, it will enable us to obtain an accurate head count, and that will be appreciated. Dr Stallman has also asked us not to use meetup.com even for optional registrations, because it uses non-free software. Therefore, I have written a tiny little html page, http://ccug.chicago.il.us/rsvp.html that will allow you to register for this event, if you wish, under an alias (if you have already registered for this event through meetup.com, please do not register again, because if you do you will be counted twice; also, if you wish to cancel a reservation that you previously made through meetup.com, you will have to cancel it through meetup.com ).


Jay F. Shachter
Last modified: Fri Mar 6 07:28:45 CST 2015