Richard Stallman Quotes
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Richard Matthew Stallman , often known by his initials, rms, and occasionally upper-case RMS, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License.

Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to create a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. With this, he also launched the free software movement. He has been the GNU project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including, among others, the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Debugger, and GNU Emacs text editor. In October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation . In September 2019, he resigned as president of the FSF and left his "visiting scientist" role at MIT. Stallman remains head of the GNU Project.Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify, and distribute free software, and is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License , the most widely used free software license.In 1989, he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management , and other legal and technical systems which he sees as taking away users' freedoms. This has included software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats, and binary executables without source code. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. March 1953
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Richard Stallman: 130   quotes 5   likes

Richard Stallman Quotes

“The GNU GPL was not designed to be ""open source"". I wrote it for the free software movement, and its purpose is to ensure every user of every version of the program gets the essential freedoms.”

""Re: GPL version 4"" on NetBSD mailing list (17 July 2008) http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2008/07/17/msg001546.html
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html for more explanation of the difference between free software and open source.
2000s

“C++ is a badly designed and ugly language. It would be a shame to use it in Emacs.”

Re: Efforts to attract more users? http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/rms" emacs-devel (12 July 2010)
2010s

“Friends share music with each other, they don't allow themselves to be divided by a system that says that nobody is supposed to have copies.”

LibrePlanet Keynote Speech (2015) @20:45 https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/richard-stallman-free-software-free-hardware/
2010s

“Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.”

"How to fight software patents - singly and together", Newsforge (9 September 2004)
2000s

“No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs — and certainly not Islam.”

On report of Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil who was sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam and Hosni Mubarak, in [http://www.stallman.org/archives/2007-jan-apr.html "Illegal to insult" (1 March 2007) http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1593050,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
2000s

“Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the US Department of Defense.”

"Bill Gates and other communists ", op-ed at ZDNet (15 February 2005) http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=38018
2000s

“Prior art is as effective as US soldiers in Iraq: They control the ground they stand on, and nothing more. I used to say Vietnam, but, well, you know…”

In a talk on Software Patents; Frankfurt am Main, Germany, (26 September 2004)
2000s

“Using GPL
is encroaching on our rights
to encroach on yours.”

Poem on opponents of the GPL’s sharing requirements, as quoted in "Stallman joins the Internet, talks net neutrality, patents and more" at NetworkWorld (23 March 2015)
2010s

“Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers' feelings.”

"Sayings" at Richard Stallman's personal site (c. 2001)
2000s

“Snow is so beautiful, it doesn't have to be useful.”

Parliament Hill Speech, Ottawa, Canada, (2 June 2009)
2000s

“Any time I connect to a website other than Wikipedia, it's through Tor.”

In a video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkkDvKGcNSo around 38:20 (published on February 22, 2016)
2010s

“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."”

We address this problem by publishing a more precise definition of free software, but this is not a perfect solution; it cannot completely eliminate the problem. An unambiguously correct term would be better, if it didn't have other problems.
1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)

“Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.”

"O'Reilly Open Source Conference: Day 3" by Paul Weinstein, in Apache Week (26 July 2002) http://www.apacheweek.com/features/oscon2002
2000s

“Four species of penguins that breed in Antartica are endangered by global warming.
Even I, the only man in the world who can get angry from looking at a picture of a penguin, find this bad news.”

"Penguins" (16 December 2007) http://www.stallman.org/archives/2007-sep-dec.html#16%20December%202007%20%28Penguins%29
2000s

“I have to explain that I'm not an anarchist – I have a pro-state gland.”

Answer to a question during his keynote speech at Libre Planet 2015. "Stallman joins the Internet, talks net neutrality, patents and more" at NetworkWorld (23 March 2015) http://www.networkworld.com/article/2900305/opensource-subnet/stallman-joins-the-internet-talks-net-neutrality-patents-and-more.html
2010s

“Laws that oppress people have no moral authority.”

Human Rights in the Use of Software and Other Published Works (16 May 2007)]
2000s

“It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign. … Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

"Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman", in The Guardian (29 September 2008) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman
2000s

“I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.”

On why he decided against writing proprietary software; quoted in Free as in Freedom : Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software' (2002) by Sam Williams http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/index.html
2000s

“If I'm the father of Open Source, it was conceived through artificial insemination using stolen sperm without my knowledge or consent.”

Reclaim Your Freedom with Free (Libre) Software (Web Summit, Lisbon, Portugal), Stallman, Richard, 2016-11-10, 2019-04-07, Web Summit https://youtube.com/watch?v=n9YDz-Iwgyw&t=1764,
2016

“Very ironic things have happened, but nothing to match this — giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is sort of like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Fleet.”

Upon receiving the Linus Torvalds Award at Linuxworld, (1999) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDxMJQLXmBE
1990s

“I see nothing unethical in the job it does. Why shouldn't you send a copy of some music to a friend?”

Comment on Napster
2000s, Thus Spake Stallman (2000)