Quotes about user

A collection of quotes on the topic of user, use, system, people.

Quotes about user

“I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.”

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

Internet meme commonly attributed to Stallman made by an unknown source.
Misattributed

People, Parting

“A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Chapter V Applied Idealism http://www.bartleby.com/55/5.html 1910s, Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913)

Dependency

“Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations; most computer users have found that they now need more, and more expensive clerks, even though they call them "operators" or "programmers.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Drucker cited in: William White (1981) Library journal. Volume 106, Nr 1-12. p. 1048
1960s - 1980s

“Good design is also an act of communication between the designer and the user, except that all the communication has to come about by the appearance of the device itself. The device must explain itself.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Introduction to the 2002 Edition, p. xi.
The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002)

Communication, Appearance

“Socrates: The shoemaker, for example, uses a square tool, and a circular tool, and other tools for cutting?
Alcibiades: Yes.
Socrates: But the tool is not the same as the cutter and user of the tool?
Alcibiades: Of course not. …
Socrates: Then what shall we say of the shoemaker? Does he cut with his tools only or with his hands?
Alcibiades: With his hands as well.
Socrates: He uses his hands too?
Alcibiades: Yes. …
Socrates: And does not a man use the whole body?
Alcibiades: Certainly.
Socrates: And that which uses is different from that which is used?
Alcibiades: True.
Socrates: Then a man is not the same as his own body?
Alcibiades: That is the inference.
Socrates: What is he, then?
Alcibiades: I cannot say.
Socrates: Nay, you can say that he is the user of the body.
Alcibiades: Yes.
Socrates: And the user of the body is the soul?
Alcibiades: Yes, the soul.”

Plato (-427–-347 BC) Classical Greek philosopher

Alcibiades I

Soul

“I have never consciously separated casual users and hardcore gamers when I design a game. For the past 20 years, I have always been trying to make games so that anyone -- as many people as possible -- can enjoy them… I cannot help but say that I love my job of making games from the bottom of my heart.”

Takashi Tezuka (1960) video game designer

Source: "In Conversation: Takashi Tezuka". http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2007/id20070629_013917.htm,Businessweek. Bloomberg L.P.(2007-06-29) Quote

Love, People, Game, Past

“The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.”

Rick Cook (1944) American writer

The Wizardry Consulted (1995)

World, Idea

“Typing in all lowercase is popular among young people, SMS users, and anyone who feels literacy has become too time-consuming.”

Merlin Mann (1966) American blogger

Twitter http://favstar.fm/users/hotdogsladies/status/890278849 Tweeting as @hotdogsladies

People, Feeling, Time

“The anatomy of self-propelling objects is subject to universal laws. Those of cars and animals are similar in many ways. First of all, there's the stomach. Stomachs are like petrol tanks. It takes energy to move around, and that energy must accompany its user. All self-propelling objects carry provisions with them in a sealed-off space, a stomach or a tank. Self-propelling beach animals like Animaris Percipiere have a stomach too. This consists of recycled plastic bottles containing air that can be pumped up to a high pressure by the wind.”

Theo Jansen (1948) artist

Source: The Great Pretender. (2007), p. 153

Law, Cars, Way, Universe

“Science is not the latest religion and scientists are not exalted priests. We have to think of science as a powerful tool that works. Using it requires responsibility. Science gives us vaccines one moment, nuclear warheads the next. It’s up to be wise tool users.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

Science, Religion, Thinking

“I've tried everything. I can say to you with confidence, I know a fair amount about LSD. I've never been a social user of any of these things, but my curiosity has carried me into a lot of interesting areas.”

Dan Rather (1931) Journalist, Anchor

Confidence

“Knowledge is a tool, and like all tools, its impact is in the hands of the user.”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

Knowledge

“Another power I don't have," said Lissa ruefully.
I grinned. "Hey, I have yet to meet any spirit user who can throw a punch like you can. That was poetry in motion, Liss." She groaned.”

Richelle Mead Blood Promise

Source: Blood Promise

“In a deep sexy voice, she said Windows don't turn me on.
I raised an eyebrow at her, Mac user?”

Diane Mott Davidson (1949) novelist

Source: Sticks & Scones

“It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out- something more "user friendly.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Source: Microserfs

Women, Problem, Waiting

“Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.”

Isaac Asimov book Foundation

Part V, The Merchant Princes, section 13
Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation (1951)

Faith

“[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

“Internet users, that blue screen of death you were looking at this morning? That's the sky. If you're still confused, look it up on Wikipedia tomorrow.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

Death

“Sitting beside Abe was Adrian Ivashkov--my more-or-less boyfriend. Adrian was a royal Moroi--and another spirit user like Lissa. He'd been crazy about me (and often just crazy) ever since we first met”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

“In their work, designers often become expert with the device they are designing. Users are often expert at the task they are trying to perform with the device. […] Professional designers are usually aware of the pitfalls. But most design is not done by professional designers, it is done by engineers, programmers, and managers.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 6, p. 156.

“Against the average user, anything works; there's no need for complex security software. Against the skilled attacker, on the other hand, nothing works.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

The Fallacy of Trusted Client Software, Schneier, Bruce, 2001-08, Cryptogram newsletter, 2018-08-12 https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2000/08/the_fallacy_of_trust.html, Digital Rights Management

“He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry.”

Gary Kildall (1942–1994) Computer scientist and entrepreneur

Unpublished memoir Computer Connections, referring to Bill Gates; quoted in Paul Andrews (14 July 1994), "A Career Spent in Gates' Shadow—Computer Pioneer Dies at 52", Seattle Times

“(In answer to the question: In the extreme case, if it was just you doing all the code, and the rest of the world quietly used it, would it make sense to give it away free? Unless you're particularly grateful for other free things you've got off the Net, would the answer be No?":)

I don't necessarily think so. It might be true in certain niche areas, but almost any project will give a developer that "feel good" feeling when he has users and he feels he is doing something worthwhile. I really don't think you need all that much "quid pro quo" in programming - most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

First Monday Interview with Linus Torvalds: What motivates free software developers?, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, interviewer, 1998‐03-02, 2013-06-02 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/583/504, 1990s, 1995-99

World, Feeling, Question, Thinking

“Users do not care about what is inside the box, as long as the box does what they need done.”

Jef Raskin book The Humane Interface

The Humane Interface (2001)

Box

“The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.”

Kenneth E. Iverson (1920–2004) Canadian computer scientist

§1.4
Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)

“Knowledge is a potential for a certain type of action, by which we mean that the action would occur if certain tests were run. For example, a library plus its user has knowledge if a certain type of response will be evoked under a given set of stipulations.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), p. 11

Knowledge

“Radically simplify the user interface, reinvent it, enough face lifts! You can put as much lipstick on a chicken as you want, it's never going to look good!”

Philippe Kahn (1952) Entrepreneur, camera phone creator

On stage to Bill Gates at a PC Forum.

“Well, with a subject like this, I'm afraid I'll have to reply. Apologies to minix-users who have heard enough about linux anyway. I'd like to be able to just "ignore the bait", but … time for some serious flamefesting!”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

comp.os.minix: LINUX is obsolete, 1992-01-29, Torvalds, Linus, 2008-12-31 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/msg/9f3c7c165aacc83f?dmode=source, 1990s, 1991-94

Time

“On-line service providers and others have a key role to play in freeing cyberspace of the taint of copyright lawlessness. Accountability for copyright violations committed by users is as essential for advancing this indispensable goal.
Who is responsible if a valuable copyrighted work is downloaded from a provider, and then copied on a digital video machine from which thousands of copies can be made, the last copy as pure and pristine as the first? And if no one can be held responsible, then who and what is to prevent the flood that will surely follow? This is a loophole larger than a parade of eight-wheelers through which a dam-busting avalanche of violations can rupture the purpose of your bill every day.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

Testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives on copyright immunities for ISPs. (7 February 1996) http://www.judiciary.house.gov/legacy/461.htm

“One of the interesting byways in this whole situation (it was perhaps more than a byway) was the conviction expressed when the [Suez Canal] Users' Association was created and the principles established for the international operation of the canal. The Users were absolutely confident, rather arrogantly so, that the Egyptians could not possibly run the canal. They could not produce the pilots, and would have to appeal to the other nations. The Users had only to sit back and the Egyptians would be on their knees saying: "Please run the canal for us." That, of course, did not happen. The canal was run just as efficiently after the Egyptian take-over as in the past. I remember a Norwegian shipowner saying: "Don't worry too much about the details of international control. They'll have to come to us in a few weeks and beg us to run the canal for them because it is a major source of their revenue and they want to make money out of it."”

Lester B. Pearson (1897–1972) 14th Prime Minister of Canada

The Egyptians made more money from it than ever did the Suez Canal Company.
Memoirs, Volume Two
Source: NB: ghost-written post-mortem by Munro and Inglis

Money, Confidence, Past

“Parents say their kids’ extreme overuse of phones, video games, and social media is the most difficult parenting issue they face — and, in many cases, is tearing the family apart. ... What none of these parents understand is that their children’s and teens’ destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually unrecognized merger between the tech industry and psychology. This alliance pairs the consumer tech industry’s immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with drug-like power to seduce young users.

These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit. What these parents and most of the world have yet to grasp is that psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.”

Richard Freed (1928) music critic, editor, and broadcaster

"The Tech Industry’s War on Kids" Medium March 11, 2018 https://medium.com/@richardnfreed/the-tech-industrys-psychological-war-on-kids-c452870464ce

Children, World, Family, Game

“However, I am no big fan of Smalltalk either, even though it compares very favourably with most programming systems today (I don’t like any of them, and I don’t think any of them are suitable for the real programming problems of today, whether for systems or for end-users).”

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

2010 for Computerworld Australia http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/352182/z_programming_languages_smalltalk-80/ 2010s

Problem, Thinking

“The major things we saw wrong with Unix when we started talking about what would become Plan 9, back around 1985, all stemmed from the appearance of a network. As a stand-alone system, Unix was pretty good. But when you networked Unix machines together, you got a network of stand-alone systems instead of a seamless, integrated networked system. Instead of one big file system, one user community, one secure setup uniting your network of machines, you had a hodgepodge of workarounds to Unix's fundamental design decision that each machine is self-sufficient.”

Rob Pike (1956) software engineer

Rob Pike (2004) in interview http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1153211&tid=189 at slashdot.com, Oct 18 2004

Communication, Decision, Appearance

“# Macrosocial systems. These include systems in communities and industrial sectors, and institutions operating at the overall level of a society. They constitute what I have called "domains". (Trist, 1976a; 1979a). One may regard media as socio-technical systems. McLuhan (1964) has shown that the technical character of different media has far-reaching effects on users. The same applies to architectural forms and the infrastructure of the built environment. Although these are not organizations, they are socio-technical phenomena. They are media in Heider's (1942) as well as McLuhan's sense.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: The evolution of socio-technical systems, (1981), p. 11

Communication, Sense

“The Code-and-Fix Model. The basic model used in the earliest days of software development contained two steps:
:1. Write some code.
:2. Fix the problems in the code.
Thus, the order of the steps was to do some coding first and to think about the requirements, design, test, and maintenance later. This model has three primary difficulties: (a) After a number of fixes, the code became so poorly structured that subsequent fixes were very expensive. This underscored the need for a design phase prior to coding. (b) Frequently, even well designed software was such a poor match to users' needs that it was either rejected outright or expensively redevelopment…”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Source: A spiral model of software development and enhancement. (1988), p. 61-62

Problem, Thinking

“Probability is too important to be left to the experts. […] The experts, by their very expert training and practice, often miss the obvious and distort reality seriously. […] The desire of the experts to publish and gain credit in the eyes of their peers has distorted the development of probability theory from the needs of the average user. The comparatively late rise of the theory of probability shows how hard it is to grasp, and the many paradoxes show clearly that we, as humans, lack a well grounded intuition in the matter. Neither the intuition of the man in the street, nor the sophisticated results of the experts provides a safe basis for important actions in the world we live in.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Source: The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers (1991), p. 4 [emphasis in original]

World, Reality, Training

“In tetrad form, the artefact is seen to be not netural or passive, but an active logos or utterance of the human mind or body that transforms the user and his ground.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 99

“A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

“The purpose of a classiﬁcation scheme is to arrange information, in documents on shelves or on cards in indexes, in a sequence that will be helpful to the user.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 93; As cited in: Mei Hong (2006, p. 44)

Help

“The problem of directing a user to stored information, some of which may be unknown to him, is the problem of "information retrieval"… In information retrieval, the addressee or receiver rather than the sender is the active party. Other differences are that communication is temporal from one epoch to a later epoch in time, though possibly at the same point in space; communication is in all cases unidirectional; the sender cannot know the particular message that will be of later use to the receiver and must send all possible messages; the message is digitally representable; a "channel" is the physical document left in storage which contains the message; and there is no channel noise because all messages are presumed to be completely accessible to the receiver. The technical goal is finding in minimum time those messages of interest to the receiver, where the receiver has available a selective device with a finite digital scanning rate.”

Calvin Mooers (1919–1994) American computer scientist

Calvin Mooers (1950). " Information retrieval viewed as temporal signaling http://www.mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1950.1/Main/icm1950.1.0565.0576.ocr.pdf#page=8". Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians. Vol. 1, S.572-573

Communication, Problem, Time

“On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate behavior from beliefs, this means on Reddit there will be people with beliefs different from your own, sometimes extremely so. When users’ actions conflict with our content policies, we take action.”

Steve Huffman (1983) American businessman

Responding to a question from a Reddit user about whether open racism and slurs are allowed on the platform. As quoted in Open racism and slurs are fine to post on Reddit, says CEO https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/12/racism-slurs-reddit-post-ceo-steve-huffman (12 April 2018) by Samuel Gibbs, The Guardian.

People, Way, Behavior, Thinking

“user named " beavis_sinatra " has been terrorizing me since 2004, by sending me pictures of cups that are too close to the edge of the table”

Dril Twitter user

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/712394817272160257] Tweets by year, 2016

“Users can work with analysts and object designers to formulate and tune system requirements. People from business, analytical and object design disciplines can come together, learn from each other and generate meaningful descriptions of systems that are to be built. Each participant and each project has slightly different concerns and needs. Practical application of use cases can go a long way to improve our ability to deliver just what the customer ordered.”

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

About Conclusion
Designing scenarios: Making the case for a use case framework (1993)

People, Way, Business, Learning

“I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can't do that, I've failed.”

Frank Gehry (1929) Canadian-American (b.1929)

Source: Blueprint. Nr. 90-92, 1992.

Feeling, Light

“Collective intelligence. Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications… We're entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected.”

Tim O'Reilly (1954) Irish computer programmer

When asked "What innovation will most alter how we live in the next few years, as quoted in TIME magazine (24 October 2005)

Way, Photo, Intelligence, Thinking

“so you think there’s no validity at all in the subjective?
there may be, there may not. in either case, it should not be used as a basis for an objective truth, which is after all what we are seeking. i have no doubt that many of those who claim to have found god have indeed felt something, but i suspect that the “something” they felt was merely a self-induced mystic experience—akin to a drug trip. witness the great numbers of drug users who claim spiritual insights as a result of their experiences. witness also the evangelists and faith-healers who induce hysteria and frenzy into their audiences so that they might feel “the hand of god” upon them. to them, god is little more than a meaningful “high.””

David Gerrold book When HARLIE Was One

Section 15 (p. 75; Dr. Auberson, then HARLIE)
When HARLIE Was One (1972)

God, Truth, Faith, Feeling

“Nobody can deny that Apple is fashionable, and most iPhone users buy the newest so they can be fashionable. To do this right, Apple needs a new phone every quarter.”

John C. Dvorak (1952) US journalist and radio broadcaster

Giddyup, Apple! http://pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406546,00.asp in PC Magazine (29 June 2012) 2010s

Fashion

“A Justice Department survey reports that 70 percent of those arrested for serious crimes are drug uses, which may mean that "drugs cause crime." A more sophisticated analysis suggests that the high cost of drugs, a result of their prohibition, forces drug users to turn crime to support an unnecessarily expensive habit.
Drug prohibition, by giving young people the thrill of breaking the law and giving pushers a strong incentive to find new customers, may actually increase the number of drug users. Moreover, out policy of pressuring friendly governments to wipe out drug cultivation has undermined many of those regimes and provoked resentment against us among their citizens and government officials.
We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this war- billions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedom — is too high.”

David Boaz (1953) libertarian, author and editor

"Let's Quit the Drug War" in The New York Times (17 March 1988) http://www.cato.org/research/articles/boaz-880317.html

War, People, Justice, Law

“The official definition of "open source software," as published by the Open Source Initiative, is very close to our definition of free software; however, it is a little looser in some respects, and they have accepted a few licenses that we consider unacceptably restrictive of the users.”

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

1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)

“Treatment is not now available for almost half of those who would benefit from it. Yet we are willing to build more and more jails in which to isolate drug users even though at one-seventh the cost of building and maintaining jail space and pursuing, detaining, and prosecuting the drug user, we could subsidize commensurately effective medical care and psychological treatment.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

The War On Drugs Is Lost (1995)

“In the past, documentation has frequently been compared with librarianship, with some argument as to which comprehends the other. The field is more helpfully characterised if we take its scope to be all forms of document (i. e. any physical carrier of symbolic messages) and all aspects of their handling, from production to delivery. The document system then becomes very much wider than conventional librarianship – it includes publication and printing, distribution, some forms of telecommunication, analysis, storage, retrieval and delivery to the user.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Concepts of documentation (1978), p. 279; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Past

“Concept maps have long provided visual languages widely used in many different disciplines and application domains. Abstractly, they are sorted graphs visually represented as nodes having a type, name and content, some of which are linked by arcs. Concretely, they are structured diagrams having discipline- and domain-specific interpretations for their user communities, and, sometimes, formally defining computer data structures. Concept maps have been used for a wide range of purposes and it would be useful to make such usage available over the World Wide Web.”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Gaines (2001) " WebMap: Concept Mapping on the Web http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/134/" on w3.org/Conferences/WWW4, 2001.

World, Communication

“Over the past thirty years, we have replaced the medical-political persecution of illegal sex users ("perverts" and "psychopaths") with the even more ferocious medical-political persecution of illegal drug users.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. xi.

Sex, Past

“Information practice… consists of two activities that we may call diagnosis and prevention. Diagnosis is identifying what is the most probable information need of a user in a particular state of information want. Provision is deciding what action is most likely to meet that need. Information science seeks to understand the potential range of user situations giving rise to information want and needs; to develop methods of identifying the actual information needed; to understand and expand the range of possible ways of satisfying information need; and to develop methods of deciding what way is most likely to be effective in a particular case.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxii-xxiii; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Way, Understanding, Science

“Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.
The reason a good citizen does not use such destructive means to become wealthier is that, if everyone did so, we would all become poorer from the mutual destructiveness. This is Kantian ethics; or, the Golden Rule. Since I do not like the consequences that result if everyone hoards information, I am required to consider it wrong for one to do so. Specifically, the desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.”

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

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

Money, World, Way, Parting

“The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will be increasingly tend to, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume--that is, the form of knowledge.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977), p.5

Knowledge

“One of the core values of libertarianism is the right of people to keep all the fruits of their labor. No taxes are fair. All taxes are, at their root, immoral because they involve the use of force to take money from people, money that rightfully belongs to them, and give it to others. That is why libertarians would fund most government services with voluntary user fees.”

R. Lee Wrights (1958–2017) American gubernatorial candidate

2012, " The Fair Tax Isn't Fair, It's a Farce http://www.libertyforall.net/?p=7101"

Money, People

“Why is it bad to use an unauthorized copy of a proprietary program? Because it’s proprietary! So an unauthorized copy is almost as nasty as an authorized copy of the same program. They are both nasty because they are proprietary. The users don’t have control over them. If they pay developer – that makes it worse, because they are rewarding this delinquency. That’s why the authorized copy is worse. But they are both bad because they are both proprietary software. If you want freedom, you have to get rid of them both, because they both control you.”

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

"Richard Stallman: Facebook IS Mass Surveillance", RT (2 December 2011) http://rt.com/news/richard-stallman-free-software-875/ 2010s

Freedom

“In order for something to Catch On, it has to be standardized. Unfortunately, there is motivation for different companies to make their own little changes in order to restrict users to their own products. The best example of how to avoid this: Philips patented its audio cartridge [i. e. the standard audio "cassette"] to the teeth, but then granted everyone free use of the patent provided they adhered to the exact standard. The result has been the system's spectacular success, and Philips, rather than dominating a small market, has a share of a far larger market, and hence makes more money. That's a virtue-rewarded kind of story.”

Ted Nelson (1937) American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist; coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"

Dream Machines
Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974, rev. 1987)

Money, Motivation, Change, Success

“While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance in technology is an opening for them to further restrict its users.”

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

Stallman's Law (2012) https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallmans-law.html 2010s Variant: While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users.

Law

“We want to provide as much information as we can, and say to our users: "It is all here. You make the choice."”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

"A Library That Would Rather Block Than Offend" by Pamela Mendels, The New York Times (January 18, 1997)

“Technologies themselves, regardless of content, produce a hemispheric bias in the users.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 71

“Wikis work best in environments where you're comfortable delegating control to the users of the system.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Exploring with Wiki

“People could no longer learn hacking the way I did, by starting to work on a real operating system, making real improvements. In fact, in the 1980s I often came across newly graduated computer science majors who had never seen a real program in their lives. They had only seen toy exercises, school exercises, because every real program was a trade secret. They never had the experience of writing features for users to really use, and fixing the bugs that real users came across. The things you need to know to do real work.”

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

"MEME 2.04", an interview with David S. Bennahum (1996)
1990s

People, Secret, School, Way

“The system should treat all user input as sacred.”

Jef Raskin book The Humane Interface

The Humane Interface (2001)

“With over a billion active users, Facebook is in a unique position to influence the world by enabling Facebook users to create grassroots movements for peace.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

World, Peace

“Apple's two most memorable accomplishments are the GUI, or graphical user interface, and the mouse, both of which it literally stole from Xerox PARC.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Technology Trends: Looking Back at 2015 http://itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/technology-trends-looking-back-at-2015.html in IT Business Edge (29 December 2015)

Guy

“The artificial intelligence people, the artificial intelligencia,… kept choosing little games to play, and little things that they could master, right? But my whole philosophy has always been give me a really tough problem that's just beyond the state-of-the-art, and give me a whole bunch of users beating on me to get it done. In other words, the real core of what being an engineer is.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1989), p. 24-25.

People, Art, Game, Intelligence

“.. in spite of the fact that it often feels as though the meaning of words and sentences were conveyed to us by the sounds of speech or the signs on a printed page, It is easy to show that meanings do not travel through space and must under all circumstances be constructed in the head of the language users.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Von Glasersfeld (1989, p. 444) cited in: Wolff-Michael Roth (2011) Passibility: At the Limits of the Constructivist Metaphor. p. 110

Travel, Feeling

“If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the "owner" of the program, that controls the program—and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.”

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

Free Software Is Even More Important Now (September 2013) https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html 2010s

Exercises

“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)

People, Guy, Communication, Decision

“The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality', how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user at Lift is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted - in all senses - disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human.”

Bill Thompson (1960) English technology writer, born 1960

" The Death of Privacy and Why We Should Welcome It http://liftconference.com/death-privacy-and-why-we-should-welcome-it," January 18, 2009. (Remarks made during the Lift Conference)

Friendship, People, Dreams, Hope

“I sent an email to my loved one, just the other day, it’s sad communication has evolved this way. We use so many words but have so little to relay, as angels scribble down every letter that we say. All the viral attachments sent and passionate insults we vent, it’s easy to be arrogant behind user passwords we invent. But on the day the scrolls are laid, with every word and deed displayed, when we read our accounts, I know, for one, I’ll be afraid.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Afraid To Read"
The Prophet's Hands (2003)

Love, Sadness, Angels, Way

“The assertion that a problem unstated is a problem unsolved seem to have escaped many builders… All too often, design and implementation begins before the real needs and system functions are fully known. The results are skyrocketing costs, missed scheduled, waste and duplication, disgruntled users and endless series of patches and repairs euphemistically called "systems maintenance"”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

D.T. Ross and K.E. Schoman (1977) "Structured analysis for requirements definition" IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Vol 3. (1) p. 6-15; as cited in: G. Agyekum-Mensah et al. (2012) "Adaption of structured analysis design techniques methodology for construction project planning".

Problem

“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

Freedom

“People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware, asking for donations from satisfied users, or selling hand-holding services. I have met people who are already working this way successfully.”

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

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

People, Way, Idea

““We’re in danger of losing the ship generation.”
“I’m aware of the problems,” she said. “‘You can’t tell the boys from the girls, they have no respect for their elders, their user interfaces are garish and unwieldy, everybody is writing a book, and their music is just noise.’ Found scratched on a potsherd in Sumer.””

Ken MacLeod book Learning the World

Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 15 “Hollow Spaces of the Forward Cone” (p. 248)

Books, Music, Girl, Boy

“At present, we have plenty of "keep quiet", but not enough freedom talk. Most people involved with free software say little about freedom — usually because they seek to be "more acceptable to business." Software distributors especially show this pattern. Some GNU/Linŭ operating system distributions add proprietary packages to the basic free system, and they invite users to consider this an advantage, rather than a step backwards from freedom.”

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

1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)

People, Business, Freedom

“Present-day computers are designed primarily to solve preformulated problems or to process data according to predetermined procedures. The course of the computation may be conditional upon results obtained during the computation, but all the alternatives must be foreseen in advance. … The requirement for preformulation or predetermination is sometimes no great disadvantage. It is often said that programming for a computing machine forces one to think clearly, that it disciplines the thought process. If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary.
However, many problems that can be thought through in advance are very difficult to think through in advance. They would be easier to solve, and they could be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperated, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution. Other problems simply cannot be formulated without computing-machine aid. … One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.
The other main aim is closely related. It is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways. Imagine trying, for example, to direct a battle with the aid of a computer on such a schedule as this. You formulate your problem today. Tomorrow you spend with a programmer. Next week the computer devotes 5 minutes to assembling your program and 47 seconds to calculating the answer to your problem. You get a sheet of paper 20 feet long, full of numbers that, instead of providing a final solution, only suggest a tactic that should be explored by simulation. Obviously, the battle would be over before the second step in its planning was begun. To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today.”

J. C. R. Licklider Man-Computer Symbiosis

Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960

Way, Error, Imagination, Problem

“As one of our colleagues recently put it, this Republican pledge of no new taxes is pure Bushlips. It's Bushlips when the president says 'No new taxes' and sends a budget requiring the Finance Committee to raise $20 billion in new revenues: $15 billion in taxes and $5 billion in user fees.”

Lloyd Bentsen (1921–2006) American politician

quoted in [24 March 1990, Paul, Taylor, Democratic Leaders Talk Tough on Taxes;President's Promise Not to Impose New Levies Is 'Pure Bushlips,' Sen. Bentsen Declares, The Washington Post, 0190-8286, A6, http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/72577580.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Mar+24%2C+1990&author=Paul+Taylor&pub=The+Washington+Post+(pre-1997+Fulltext)&edition=&startpage=a.06&desc=Democratic+Leaders+Talk+Tough+on+Taxes%3BPresident%27s+Promise+Not+to+Impose+New+Levies+Is+%60Pure+Bushlips%2C%27+Sen.+Bentsen+Declares]
alluding to George H. W. Bush's pledge “Read my lips: no new taxes” while accepting the presidential nomination at the 1988 Republican National Convention

“The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Symbolic Reader, p. 214.
A History of Reading (1996)

Books

“If I am correct, the use of a product based on modelessness and monoty would soon become so habitual as to be nearly addictive, leading to a user population devoted to and loyal to the product.”

Jef Raskin book The Humane Interface

The Humane Interface (2001)

“Literacy remains even now the base and model of all programs of industrial mechanization; but, at the same time, locks the minds and senses of its users in the mechanical and fragmentary matrix that is so necessary to the maintenance of mechanized society.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1960s, Understanding Media (1964)

Sense, Time

“Samsung did to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft, skewering its devoted users and reputation, only better. … There is a way for Apple to fight back, but the company no longer has that skill, and apparently doesn't know where to get it, either.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

How Apple lost its cool (and how it can win it back) http://digitaltrends.com/opinion/how-apple-lost-its-cool-and-how-it-can-win-it-back in Digital Trends (13 April 2013)

Way, Fight

“A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within 10 seconds.”

Ted Nelson (1937) American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist; coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"

Ted Nelson motto http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=6681

Understanding

“This paper reports on a comparative case study of 13 industrial firms that implemented an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. It compares firms based on their dialectic leaming process. All firms had to overcome knowledge barriers of two types: those associated with the configuration of the ERP package, and those associated with the assimilation of new work processes. We found that both strong core teams and carefully managed consulting relationships addressed configuration knowledge barriers. User training that included both technical and business processes, along with a phased implementation approach, helped firms to overcome assimilation knowledge barriers. However, all firms in this study experienced ongoing concerns with assimilation knowledge barriers, and we observed two different approaches to address them. In a piecemeal approach, firms concentrated on the technology first and deferred consideration of process changes. In a concerted approach, both the technology and process changes were undertaken together. Although most respondents clearly stated a preference for either piecemeal or concerted change, all firms engaged in practices that reflected a combination of these approaches.”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

Abstract, p. 17-18
Learning to implement enterprise systems (2002)

Business, Knowledge, Study, Strong

“The first paper I ever wrote was "Gestalt Programming" and that was in 1955. The whole idea there was to replace the laborious writing out of detailed programs and all those steps by having analyzed a problem area well enough so that you had what I later came to call a "systematized solution." Then you could compose different problems of this class by just plugging together pieces of program, and they would in turn be controlled by a pushbutton language. The user would make a number of discreet selections. It's just like nowadays it's done with menus, and when you had indicated all the pieces that you wanted to put together--by these mnemonic names and words for things associated with buttons, switches, with one meaning "period," essentially, for that sentence, you see--all these things would be brought together and that would be the man/machine, manual-intervention mode of problem-solving. I took over the term from studying Gestalt psychology, meaning that everything was brought together at once, as a unit, instead of this laborious step-by-step build-up.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: An Interview with Douglas T. Ross (1989), p. 4.

Idea, Problem, Study

“I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. […] And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."
Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. […]
We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?"”

Clay Shirky (1964) American technology writer

And I'm betting the answer is yes.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (2008)

Way, Change, Daughters

“The user is the content of any situation, whether its driving a car, or wearing clothes or watching a show. The user is content.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1970s, Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (1976)

Cars, Clothes

“There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. … I'm saying we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Focus Magazine No. 43 (23 October 1995) http://www.cantrip.org/nobugs.html  1990s

People, Personality

“Designed as a companion volume to the acclaimed Object-Oriented Analysis, this book focuses on the middle part of the software lifecycle: the activity of design. It shows readers how to apply object-oriented design, and how to tailor and expand the method to suit specific organization and project needs. Readers will explore the major issues in OOD; the role of OOD in the systems lifecycle; how to use graphical notation; strategies for creating design; and hints for evaluating the efficiency of a design created with OOD. For software engineers and other users undertaking real-world systems development projects and designing overall software architecture for systems will find this reference approach to improving systems design indispensable.”

Ed Yourdon (1944–2016) American software engineer and pioneer in the software engineering methodology

Abstract.
Object-oriented design (1991)

Books, World, Parting

“Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 266

Intelligence

“Never ask what sort of computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

As quoted in Escape The Pace: 100 Fun And Easy Ways To Slow Down And Enjoy Your Life (2002) by Lisa Rickwood; this quote appears at least as early as 1996 online
1990s

Guy