Richard Stallman Quotes

Paying isn’t wrong, and being paid isn’t wrong. Trampling other people’s freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.

I believe our basic information, our 'software', should be free and open for everyone to play with, to compete with, to try and make products from. I do not believe it should be under the control of one person.

A smartphone is a computer - it's not built using a computer - the job it does is the job of being a computer. So, everything we say about computers, that the software you run should be free - you should insist on that - applies to smart phones just the same. And likewise to those tablets.

I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the pay for use binary shareware programs.

As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.

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.

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.

I think the wonderful thing about vi is that it has such a good market share because we gave it away.

Proprietary software is an injustice.

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.

I have really become a huge believer in the power of open source.

There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.

I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about "open source" thinking that I work under that banner.

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.

When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.

There is no system but GNU and Linux is one of it's kernels

Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.

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.

We need to teach people to refuse to install non-free plug-ins; we need to teach people to care more about their long-term interest of freedom than their immediate desire to view a particular site.

The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software.

I changed the Linux copyright license to be the GPL some time in the first half of 1992. Mostly because I had hated the lack of a cheaply and easily available UNIX when I had looked for one a year before.

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.

I'd like to point out that I don't think that there is anything fundamentally superior in the GPL as compared to the BSD license, for example. But the GPL is what I want to program with, because unlike the BSD license it guarantees that anybody who works on the project in the future will also contribute their changes back to the community.

The GNU GPL was not designed to be "open source".