Richard Stallman quotes - page 2

Snow is so beautiful, it doesn't have to be useful. (Richard Stallman)
I don't have a problem with someone using their talents to become successful, I just don't think the highest calling is success. Things like freedom and the expansion of knowledge are beyond success, beyond the personal. Personal success is not wrong, but it is limited in importance, and once you have enough of it it is a shame to keep striving for that, instead of for truth, beauty, or justice. View quote
Richard Stallman
It doesn't take special talents to reproduce - even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of. It helps more people, too. View quote
Richard Stallman
Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization. I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. View quote
Richard Stallman
There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children. Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That's not willing participation, it's imposed participation, a different issue. View quote
Richard Stallman
Sometimes you can justify doing something that hurts other people by saying otherwise something worse is going to happen to me. You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software. View quote
Richard Stallman
The programmers who write improvements to GCC (or Emacs, or Bash, or Linŭ, or any GPL-covered program) are often employed by companies or universities. When the programmer wants to return his improvements to the community, and see his code in the next release, the boss may say, "Hold on there - your code belongs to us! We don't want to share it; we have decided to turn your improved version into a proprietary software product." Here the GNU GPL comes to the rescue. The programmer shows the boss that this proprietary software product would be copyright infringement, and the boss realizes that he has only two choices: release the new code as free software, or not at all. Almost always he lets the programmer do as he intended all along, and the code goes into the next release. View quote
Richard Stallman
Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction. The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness. This is Kantian ethics; or, the Golden Rule. Since I do not like the consequences that result if everyone hoards information, I am required to consider it wrong for one to do so. Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity. View quote
Richard Stallman
Why is it bad to use an unauthorized copy of a proprietary program? Because it's proprietary! So an unauthorized copy is almost as nasty as an authorized copy of the same program. They are both nasty because they are proprietary. The users don't have control over them. If they pay developer – that makes it worse, because they are rewarding this delinquency. That's why the authorized copy is worse. But they are both bad because they are both proprietary software. If you want freedom, you have to get rid of them both, because they both control you. View quote
Richard Stallman
Friends share music with each other, they don't allow themselves to be divided by a system that says that nobody is supposed to have copies. View quote
Richard Stallman
'The main argument for the term "open source software" is that "free software" makes some people uneasy. That's true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather ignore. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may reject the idea for that. It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking about these things. (Richard Stallman)
Four species of penguins that breed in Antartica are endangered by global warming. Even I, the only man in the world who can get angry from looking at a picture of a penguin, find this bad news. View quote
Richard Stallman
...when I do this, some people think that it's because I want my ego to be fed, right? Of course, I'm not saying - I'm not asking you to call it "Stallmanix," right? View quote
Richard Stallman
He [somebody at Carnegie Mellon University] had betrayed us. But he didn't just do it to us. Chances are he did it to you too. [Pointing at member of audience. ] And I think, mostly likely, he did it to you too. [Pointing at another member of audience. ][Laughter] And he probably did it to you as well. [Pointing to third member of audience. ] He probably did it to most of the people here in this room - except a few, maybe, who weren't born yet in 1980. Because he had promised to refuse to cooperate with just about the entire population of the Planet Earth. He had signed a non-disclosure agreement. View quote
Richard Stallman
It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign. ... Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true. View quote
Richard Stallman
There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction. View quote
Richard Stallman
Whether gods exist or not, there is no way to get absolute certainty about ethics. Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. View quote
Richard Stallman
Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel. View quote
Richard Stallman
Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine. View quote
Richard Stallman
As one person put it, "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement." View quote
Richard Stallman
I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it. In any intellectual field, one can reach greater heights by standing on the shoulders of others. But that is no longer generally allowed in the software field-you can only stand on the shoulders of the other people in your own company. (Richard Stallman)
It is unfortunate that he still has nonfree software in his computer. He needs to defenestrate it (which means, either throw Windows out of the computer or throw the computer out of the window). View quote
Richard Stallman
To avoid horrible confusion, please pronounce the G in the word GNU when it is the name of this project. View quote
Richard Stallman
When I released GNU Emacs and people started using it, they started sending me improvements in the mail. So I would get a message with a bug fix, and a message with a new feature, and another bug fix, and another new feature, and another... and another... until they were pouring in on me so fast that just taking advantage of all of the help people were giving me was a big job. Microsoft doesn't have this problem. View quote
Richard Stallman
Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing. View quote
Richard Stallman