Richard Stallman quotes - page 6

The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says "no" to some of the things that people sometimes want to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing - that the GPL "excludes" some proprietary software developers who "need to be brought into the free software community." But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter. Their decision to make software proprietary is a decision to stay out of our community. Being in our community means joining in cooperation with us; we cannot "bring them into our community" if they don't want to join. What we can do is offer them an inducement to join. The GNU GPL is designed to make an inducement from our existing software: "If you will make your software free, you can use this code." (Richard Stallman)
The term "free software" has an ambiguity problem: an unintended meaning, "Software you can get for zero price," fits the term just as well as the intended meaning, "software which gives the user certain freedoms." View quote
Richard Stallman
America means Civil Liberties, Patriotism Is protecting them. View quote
Richard Stallman
To call us "open source" is like calling Kucinich a Republican. View quote
Richard Stallman
To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. View quote
Richard Stallman
Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy. View quote
Richard Stallman
If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal. View quote
Richard Stallman
In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't. View quote
Richard Stallman
Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic. View quote
Richard Stallman
The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way. View quote
Richard Stallman
All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights. (Richard Stallman)
I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute. View quote
Richard Stallman
Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go. View quote
Richard Stallman
GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it. View quote
Richard Stallman
A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness - not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean "security breaker.”. View quote
Richard Stallman
Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. View quote
Richard Stallman
Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step. View quote
Richard Stallman
If in my lifetime the problem of non-free software is solved, I could perhaps relax and write software again. But I might instead try to help deal with the world's larger problems. Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it. View quote
Richard Stallman
Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom. View quote
Richard Stallman
The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part. View quote
Richard Stallman
Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users dont have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware. (Richard Stallman)
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time. View quote
Richard Stallman
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
If ebooks mean that readers' freedom must either increase or decrease, we must demand the increase. View quote
Richard Stallman
The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. View quote
Richard Stallman