GNU Emacs Manual, For Version 21, 15th Edition
Richard M. Stallman is the original author of GNU Emacs and is still its maintainer. He was recently awarded the 2001 Takeda Award for Techno-Entrepreneurial Achievements in Social/Economic Well-Being.Stallman is internationally recognized as the creator of the Free Software movement - a progressive worldwide movement to make software code freely available so as to improve its development and accessibility. He has received a host of computer science honors ranging from a 1990 MacArthur "Genius Grant" to his election into the American National Academy of Engineering in 2002.In 1984 Stallman resigned from his job as a researcher at MIT's AI Lab in protest of its increasingly restrictive copyright policy. He countered by starting the GNU Project, a revolutionary concept at that time, and by writing the General Public License. GNU with the LINUX kernel was the first freely distributable operating system available with source code and protected by the GPL.