Free Software Foundation

Leadership

The Free Software Foundation is directed by:

Richard M. Stallman, President
Peter T. Brown, Controller and Executive Director

The Free Software Foundation has seven people on its board of directors. They are:

Gerald J. Sussman, Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT. He has been involved in artificial intelligence research at MIT since 1964. He co-authored Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics and is the recipient of numerous awards, including ACM's Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award and the Amar G. Bose award for teaching. He is a fellow of numerous institutions including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the ACM, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the New York Academy of Arts, and Sciences.
Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the FSF. He is a free software developer and activist, he is the founder of the GNU Project and the author of the GNU General Public License. He is the principal author of the GNU Compiler Collection and wrote the GNU symbolic debugger, GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system. He has received numerous awards, including the Association for Computing Machinery Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.
Geoffrey Knauth, Computer Science Instructor at Lycoming College. He is an independent software contractor, has worked as a programmer, senior associate, systems engineer, and systems analyst at various companies and has contributed to the GNU Objective-C project. He is fluent in Russian and French and has a working knowledge of German, which helps him maintain relationships with computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists of the Russian Academy of Sciences and with United States economists, scientists, and agencies. He holds a BA in Economics from Harvard University and is the treasurer of the FSF.
Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford University. He is the founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He was a professor at Harvard Law School and at the University of Chicago before clerking for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Antonin Scalia. In 1998 he represented web site operator Eric Eldred in a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He has won numerous awards, including the FSF's Advancement of Free Software award. He has authored several books, including Free Culture, The Future of Ideas, and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. He chairs the Creative Commons project and is a board member of the EFF, the Public Library of Science and the Public Knowledge, and is a columnist for Wired.
Benjamin Mako Hill, researcher at MIT's Media Laboratory. He is an author, technology and copyright researcher, activist, and consultant. He has been a leader, developer, and contributor to the free software community for more than a decade as part of the Debian, Ubuntu projects and co-authored the Debian GNU/Linux Bible and the Official Ubuntu Book. He is currently helping build software for the One Laptop per Child project while pursuing research in free software processes at the MIT's Sloan School.
Henri Poole, founder of CivicActions, a grassroots campaign technology consulting firm. Henri Poole is an internet strategist with three decades' experience in information technology and more than a decade's with online communities and commerce. He was the first technologist to set up a blog for a member of the US House of Representatives. He has presented at conferences in Europe and in the US, and was the technical editor of Demystifying Multimedia. He co-founded CivicActions, a grassroots campaign technology consulting firm in 2004, helping provide network-centric free software technology solutions focusing on transforming the world.
Hal Abelson, Professor of Electrical Engineeering and Computer Science at MIT. He was designated as one of MIT's six inaugural MacVicar Faculty Fellows and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the MIT School of Engineering's Bose award, the IEEE Taylor L. Booth Education Award. He is co-director of the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Research Alliance in Educational Technology and of the MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation and co-chair of the MIT Council on Educational Technology. He serves on the steering committee of the HP-MIT Alliance. He developed and teaches the MIT course Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier and co-authored Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. He is a founding director of Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and the FSF.

Last modified 2007-10-11 03:14 PM