Ram Shriram Quotes

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.

If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology.

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.

Open rules! Open standards! Open findings! Open precedents!

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.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing

A governing ethos of the Internet has been that whatever flows through it - information, ideas - is up for grabs.

All information belongs to everybody all the time. It should be available. It should be accessible to the child, to the woman, to the man, to the old person, to the semiliterate, to the presidents of universities, to everyone. It should be open.

I am in favor of complete freedom of information and of free access to the new communication tools, in particular the Internet.

If networked science is to reach its potential, scientists will have to embrace and reward the open sharing of all forms of scientific knowledge, not just traditional journal publication. Networked science must be open science.

I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.

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

The free flow of information is vital for economic development.

… free access to scientific information … the abolition of barriers hitherto considered necessary to safeguard national interest but now standing in the way of common security against unprecedented dangers

'Free' is the museum show of our times, presaging the whole Wikileaks dustup, and it shows shifting power dynamics and a glimpse of the human in a world of flowing data.

The Internet has done so much for so many. It allows women and minorities to have access to education, training, and information that sometimes isn't available to them for whatever reason.

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

Metadata liberates us, liberates knowledge.

Make information free for all.

We should probably figure out a new word for this. For us, "open" means transparent, as in "open source" - you're not locked in to what the original creator did. And in our case "open" also means distributed decision making.

There is no such thing as intellectual property.

The alternative to intellectual property is straightforward: intellectual products should not be owned, as in the case of everyday language. That means not owned by individuals, corporations, governments, or the community as common property. It means that ideas are available to be used by anyone who wants to.

Ideas exist in the marketplace; they are thrown out for everyone to use.

The free access to information is not a privilege, but a necessity for any free society. One of my favorite things to do as a young man was wander through the stacks of my hometown library. I'd just browse until I found something interesting. Libraries have definitely changed my life.

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