Richard Stallman Quotes

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

Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did.

Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

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.

While I personally believe strongly in the philosophy and ideology of the Free Software movement, you can't win people over just on philosophy; you have to have a better product, too.

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.

The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.

All of our code is open source, so it can be used for other projects.

There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.

When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

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.

In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.

Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.

There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.

I've always felt that sort of in the abstract, open-source is the right thing to do for a lot of the kinds of things that we do. There are a variety of issues that make it a very complex discussion as to whether it actually works as a business.

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.

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 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.

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.

Once a term like "open source" entered our vocabulary, one could recast the whole public policy calculus in very different terms, so that instead of discussing the public interest, we are discussing the interests of individual software developers, while claiming that this is a discussion about "innovation" and "progress," not "accountability" or "security."

In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.

While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.