2026: The Year Richard Stallman Came Back to American Campuses
There's more on the way
At the beginning of this year Richard Stallman (RMS) gave his first talk in an American campus in nearly a decade. Later in the year he did the same thing again and there are plans underway to repeat this. So let's look back and reflect.
"Our goal in bringing RMS and the FSF to campus is to connect brilliant students and projects across institutions," one organiser told us. "I previously shared our project directory, librelinker.us, and I also shared it with RMS. While he appreciated the breadth of projects, one in particular stood out to him."
"Georgia Tech, as a public institution, hosts a large, well-funded reverse engineering lab. I’ve had the honor of taking two courses with the lab’s head professor and learned an incredible amount - not only about malware, but about operating systems more broadly and learning to look for answers where others miss. The lab has already expressed strong interest in meeting RMS during his visit, and we’re likely to arrange a visit on one of his free days."
While there, RMS was trying to encourage the sort of education that would result in real programmers, not GAFAM "lemmings".
To quote: "RMS was especially interested in a cross-lab reverse engineering effort aimed at running unmodified NVIDIA CUDA code on non-NVIDIA hardware. Georgia Tech also operates a Class 1 chip fabrication facility and has developed its own open RISC-V boards for research. The best part is that this work is entirely free hardware and free software - and with the FSF’s reach, we may be able to help take on this "green beast” in a meaningful way."
"This semester, LibreTech’s finance officer, Alan, and I are taking the Operating Systems course here at Georgia Tech. While we’re certainly prepared to learn a great deal, we’re also hoping to invite RMS to sit in on a session and share his thoughts on the quality of education here. We already rely heavily on GNU tools in our coursework - my cybersecurity class last semester was essentially an introduction to GDB, the very debugger RMS wrote nearly 50 years ago at MIT."
From what we understand, RMS plans to come back there some time. Connections and ties were forged and there's expectation of further public appearances. The first one was a great success.
Moreover, since then, LibreLocal took place there as well as in many other places. █
