“As soon as I learned about this miracle of chip making I thought, what is the key missing element? … I'd been working on software so I decided that maybe that was what was necessary to bring all this power to life. I talked about that with a friend, Paul Allen, and we kept saying, "What can we do? Can we start our own software company?" It seemed impossible at the time because software was not done by independent companies. The companies that built the computers — IBM and DEC — they did all the software. And when we called them up and said, "We would like to do an operating system," they said, "who are you?" to which we said, "we're high-school students."”

— Bill Gates

That was s, uh — that was the end of that conversation. <br class="br">Speech to the Economic Club of Detroit (1997) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzX6UUJ461s <br class="br">1990s

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Bill Gates92

American business magnate and philanthropist 1955

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“Over the years, many companies have contributed to free software development. Some of these companies primarily developed non-free software, but the two activities were separate; thus, we could ignore their non-free products, and work with them on free software projects. Then we could honestly thank them afterward for their free software contributions, without talking about the rest of what they did.
We cannot do the same with these new companies, because they won't let us. These companies actively invite the public to lump all their activities together; they want us to regard their non-free software as favorably as we would regard a real contribution, although it is not one. They present themselves as "open source companies," hoping that we will get a warm fuzzy feeling about them, and that we will be fuzzy-minded in applying it.
This manipulative practice would be no less harmful if it were done using the term "free software."”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

But companies do not seem to use the term "free software" that way; perhaps its association with idealism makes it seem unsuitable. The term "open source" opened the door for this.
1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)

“My opinion is that the only two computer companies that are software-driven are Apple and NeXT, and I wonder about Apple.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

As quoted in Fortune (26 August 1991)
1990s

“Before Paul and I started the company, we had been involved in some large-scale software projects that were real disasters. They just kept pouring people in, and nobody knew how they were going to stabilize the project. We swore to ourselves that we would do better.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

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“Philosophy is possible only because the material ensemble called “man” is endowed with very sophisticated software. But also, this software, human language, is dependent on the condition of the hardware. Now: the hardware will be consumed in the solar explosion, taking philosophical thought with it (along with all other thought) as it goes up in flames. So the problem of the technological sciences can be stated as follows: how can we provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth? That is: how can we make thought without a body possible?”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: Thought Without a Body? (1994), p. 291

“I actually am fairly uncomfortable about it, even if our firm stipulation was that they cannot tell us what to do. We are simply doing what we do anyways — securing software — and they have no say in the matter. I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a cruise missile doesn't get built.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

Quoted in U.S. military helps fund Calgary hacker, Akin, David, 2004-04-06, 2007-01-10, Globe and Mail, http://web.archive.org/web/20040815134728/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030406.whack46/BNStory/Technology/?query=openbsd, 2004-08-15 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030406.whack46/BNStory/Technology/?query=openbsd, <br class="br">on receiving a monetary grant from the US military.

“Chen is not only ahead of Steve Jobs in terms of turnaround speed, he has done something that both HP and Sun failed at: turned a hardware company into a software and services company, arguably something Jobs couldn't have done. … Jobs smartly decided to kill the process at Apple to transition that company to software and services. Jobs didn't understand how to do that and would have likely failed because he was just a hardware guy.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

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“Sun is one of many US companies that file software patents regularly, the reason we file software patents regularly is the same reason that Americans buy guns. Americans buy guns, because Americans buy guns. American corporations file software patents because American corporations file software patents.”

Simon Phipps computer scientist

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“The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says "no" to some of the things that people sometimes want to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing — that the GPL "excludes" some proprietary software developers who "need to be brought into the free software community."
But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter. Their decision to make software proprietary is a decision to stay out of our community. Being in our community means joining in cooperation with us; we cannot "bring them into our community" if they don't want to join.
What we can do is offer them an inducement to join. The GNU GPL is designed to make an inducement from our existing software: "If you will make your software free, you can use this code."”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

Of course, it won't win 'em all, but it wins some of the time.
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“Hate speech is difficult to define. There's a reason why it's not really done. additionally, we are not the thought police. It's not the role of a private company to decide what people can and cannot say.”

Steve Huffman (1983) American businessman

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“What if we could make the company better? If we could change things…make it a better place to work. I mean, there are so many things we could do.”

Max Barry book Company

Holly looks at him blankly. Freddy says, “Jones…you’re still new here People suggest ways to improve the company every day. Their ideas go into the suggestion box in the cafeteria—where the cafeteria was, I mean—and they’re never heard from again, except during all-staff meetings when Senior Management picks out the most useless one and announces a cross-functional team to look into it. A year or two later, when everyone’s forgotten about it, we get an e-mail announcing the implementation of something that bears no resemblance to the initial idea and usually has the opposite effect, and in the annual reports this is used as evidence that the company listens and reacts to its workers. That’s what happens when you try to make Zephyr a better place to work.”
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