Richard Stallman

I do belong to software field and so i should have known but i did not. And i was not alone. None of my friends knew it either (well this still does not mean that i should not have known but it explains the situation better). But i was fortunate enough to work with a guy who knew him and who very much knew what Richard means. One day he asked me to read Free As in Freedom book which explains how it all started for Richard Stallman . In case you still do not know much about him please read as much as you can about him.
In college i never cared about Linux and certainly not for Free Software. But after reading that book i changed. Seriously there never was a book read in recent times which influenced me so much. I got to know about What is really meant by Free Software for the first time in my life and at that very moment i knew i belong to this movement. Agreed , i am not as hard core hacker as some of his fans are but still i knew i gotta be part of the whole thing or i will not be what i am !. At least i can start using open source software.(Well open source does not necessarily mean Free as Richard always points out) but this can certainly be start and i got started.

Why i like Richard so much ?
When i read the book i just found myself agreeing with most of the part. As simple as this. He has taken a very important task of our time to protect freedom of end users (consumers of software product). Many people currently fail to see what he means but he sees what we can not see. Also his motives do not seem to be for money but only for freedom. Yes to me he is one of the greatest Freedom Fighter of our time. Being from India i come across many stories about how western people are trying to steal age old wisdom of ancient Indian people by patenting everyday things. This makes me give serious thoughts for any patent related issues. And this is where i see more potential in Richard's ideas. He is out there spreading GPL V3 now which i completely supports .. He is helping us to prepare for things to come in far future.
When there are great people around , common people have natural tendency to compare them and so comparison between Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds becomes inevitable. I do not like to chose here as these two people have done completely different things and both of them are great but if it comes to that i am with Richard without any doubt. If it was not Linus , it would have been somebody else. Something like Linux was bound to come. But i am not sure if we can say similar thing for Richard. His role in protecting end users rights when it comes to software is the biggest and will remain so in times to come.

Thank you Richard , For letting us know battle of Freedom is far from over .... You teach us what Freedom really means.