Someone at Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is Censoring the Birthday Greetings to Richard Stallman

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 16, 2026,
updated Mar 16, 2026

Maybe it's due to some editorial mistake (convenient excuse of the act/fact), but let's give an overview.

Last night A Happy Birthday to Richard Stallman

Some people remember:

The "page" is a JS 'app', so we replicate the text below:

On March 16, Richard M. Stallman (also known as RMS) turned 73! 🎂🥂

Richard Stallman founded GNU in September 1983 as a project to develop a free (libre) operating system. Since then, the free software movement has kicked off and continues to this day.

In the early days of this movement, Stallman formulated the criteria for free (libre) software. It must provide its users with the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Stallman even came up with the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify, and distribute free software.

On February 25, 1989, the first version of the GNU General Public License was released, giving legal strength to the free software movement. And before that, on March 22, 1987, Stallman released the first version of the GNU C Compiler (GCC), which gave technical strength to the free software movement. For example, thanks to GCC, the Linux kernel became possible.

⚠️ Do not confuse the terms Free Software and Open Source. The focus of Free Software on user rights and freedom, rather than just technical aspects, makes it a more philosophical and ideological movement.

📖 Steven Levy in his book says that Richard Stallman is the Last of the Hackers, who vowed to defend the principles of hackerism to the bitter end.

Credits:

- The cover is based on the photo of Richard Stallman taken by NicoBZH from Saint Etienne. The photo is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

- The GNU logo is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 License.

License:

This picture is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

ACM published a greeting to RMS. But it has since then been deleted:

In Facebook: "Happy Birthday to Richard Stallman, free software activist..."

Deleted also:

It was a 38-second video.

Infighting at the ACM? Remember what happened in Georgia. █