“The programmers who write improvements to GCC (or Emacs, or Bash, or Linŭ, or any GPL-covered program) are often employed by companies or universities. When the programmer wants to return his improvements to the community, and see his code in the next release, the boss may say, "Hold on there — your code belongs to us! We don't want to share it; we have decided to turn your improved version into a proprietary software product."
Here the GNU GPL comes to the rescue. The programmer shows the boss that this proprietary software product would be copyright infringement, and the boss realizes that he has only two choices: release the new code as free software, or not at all. Almost always he lets the programmer do as he intended all along, and the code goes into the next release.”

— Richard Stallman

1990s, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism (1998)

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Richard Stallman 130

American software freedom activist, short story writer and … 1953

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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.
1990s, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism (1998)

“You see, some people have a talent for programming. At ten to thirteen years old, typically, they're fascinated, and if they use a program, they want to know: “How does it do this?” But when they ask the teacher, if it's proprietary, the teacher has to say: “I'm sorry, it's a secret, we can't find out.” Which means education is forbidden. A proprietary program is the enemy of the spirit of education. It's knowledge withheld, so it should not be tolerated in a school, even though there may be plenty of people in the school who don't care about programming, don't want to learn this. Still, because it's the enemy of the spirit of education, it shouldn't be there in the school.
But if the program is free, the teacher can explain what he knows, and then give out copies of the source code, saying: “Read it and you'll understand everything.” And those who are really fascinated, they will read it! And this gives them an opportunity to start to learn how to be good programmers.
To learn to be a good programmer, you'll need to recognize that certain ways of writing code, even if they make sense to you and they are correct, they're not good because other people will have trouble understanding them. Good code is clear code that others will have an easy time working on when they need to make further changes.
How do you learn to write good clear code? You do it by reading lots of code, and writing lots of code. Well, only free software offers the chance to read the code of large programs that we really use. And then you have to write lots of code, which means you have to write changes in large programs.
How do you learn to write good code for the large programs? You have to start small, which does not mean small program, oh no! The challenges of the code for large programs don't even begin to appear in small programs. So the way you start small at writing code for large programs is by writing small changes in large programs. And only free software gives you the chance to do that.”

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

A Free Digital Society - What Makes Digital Inclusion Good or Bad? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-digital-society.html#education; Lecture at Sciences Po in Paris (19 October 2011)]
2010s

“Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[8571@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Kent Beck (1961) software engineer

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 15

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 15

“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.”

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

""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