John Sulston Quotes

You share things with people and I think information, and art, and ideas should be shared.

I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia.

I think, ultimately, open always wins out. It wins out because you cannot lock data in; you can't lock people in. They will find a way out.

Proprietary software is an injustice.

The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good.

The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.

I come from the school who thought the Internet could be the great democratising force, that getting rid of the gatekeepers was a positive move.

Knowledge should be a public good, and I want my ideas to have as much exposure as possible.

The free sharing and teaching of open source is incompatible with the notion of the solitary genius.

We're living in an age where we should be collaborating. Because it's the Internet now. It's hard to say who owns what.

The greatest interest at stake is not that of the copyright holders or the database companies, rather it is the interest a free and open society has in ensuring that everyone can learn the facts, regardless of their economic background. We should regard our nation’s involvement in the knowledge of its citizens … as the highest and most precious intellectual property we can ever protect.

Arrangements to make people pay for using a program, including licensing of copies, always incur a tremendous cost to society through the cumbersome mechanisms necessary to figure out how much (that is, which programs) a person must pay for. And only a police state can force everyone to obey them. Consider a space station where air must be manufactured at great cost: charging each breather per liter of air may be fair, but wearing the metered gas mask all day and all night is intolerable even if everyone can afford to pay the air bill. And the TV cameras everywhere to see if you ever take the mask off are outrageous. It's better to support the air plant with a head tax and chuck the masks. Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.

The best ideas are common property.

Music, photography, media, film - it's all going to be free on the Internet. We have to accept it.

Providing free access to research papers on websites like Sci-Hub breaks so-called copyright law that was made to taboo free distribution of information on the Internet. That includes music, movies, documentaries, books, and research articles. Not everyone agrees that copyright law should exist in the first place.

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.

I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.

The idea of free software is that users of computing deserve freedom. They deserve in particular to have control over their computing. And proprietary software does not allow users to have control of their computing.

Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.

I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.

Yeah, I mean, I put work out there for people to use and I'm grateful when you use it.

A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.

When I launched the development of the GNU system, I explicitly said the purpose of developing this system is so we can use our computers and have freedom, thus if you use some other free system instead but you have freedom, then it's a success. It's not popularity for our code but it's success for our goal.

They seem to have forgotten that, and are back saying the only purpose of P2P networks is for illegal trading of owned goods. We claim part of the reason for P2P is for legal trading of what ought to be in public domain. And what is in public domain in many cases.

Information on the Internet must be as free as in the newspapers.