FREEDOMOLOGY - Key Persons
Excluding eighteen months at Rockwell International, the bulk of Dr. Wanda M. Austin's career as an aerospace engineer was spent at the Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit organization that continues to assist and contribute to national space programs. She served as a member of the Corporation's technical staff until 1996, as general manager of multiple different divisions until 1999, as senior vice president of the Engineering and Technology group until 2004, and as senior vice president of the national system group until 2008.
On New Year's Day, 2008, Austin was named CEO of the Aerospace Corporation, and was both the first woman and the first African-American to hold the position. In 2015, President Obama appointed her to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Austin retired from the Aerospace Corporation in 2016, but continues to serve on the board of directors at the Space Foundation, a similar nonprofit.
Jean E. Sammet was the developer of the programming language known as FORMAC. She worked with Sylvania, an American electrical equipment manufacturer, as a programming research consultant.
She created FORMAC, her best-known brainchild, during her time with IBM. FORMAC was the first popular programming language used for symbolic control of math formulas.
Sammet was also the first female president of the Association for Computing Machinery, and was awarded the Ada Lovelace Award for her accomplishments.
She died on May 20, 2017, at age 89.
Richard Matthew "rms" Stallman, born on March 16, 1953, is a developer responsible for the GNU General Public License, a system of free software licenses designed to ensure end users can use or change software however they want. This level of freedom is championed by the Free Software Foundation, of which Stallman is a founder, former leader, and prominent proponent.
Stallman also coined the term Copyleft, a practice of copyright law with one single rule: you can change copylefted software however you like, but the changed software must be made available for others to change as well.
He is the founder and head of the GNU Project, which aims to produce software that gives users the level of freedom the GPL is made to grant.
Hailed as the Godfather of Silicon Valley, Roy Clay Sr. was a founding member of the computers' division at Hewlett-Packard - the famous "HP" on the back of your laptop, the side of your printer, the shiny logo on the front of your camera.
Clay had taught himself to code in the 1950s, and was a programmer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory when HP's co-founder David Packard noticed him and offered him a job. Back then, HP primarily dealt in semiconductors, but Clay's involvement pushed the company leagues forward to where it is today. To start, he developed the hardware and wrote the software of the second 16-bit computer ever made, the HP 2116A.
In 1977, Clay left HP and started his own company, ROD-L Electronics, where he worked with several tech giants, including his former employers, to develop electrical safety testing equipment.
Clay was also the first African-American city councilman (and later Vice Mayor) of Palo Alto, California.