Richard Stallman

1953– · American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer,

Topics: open source, programming, unix, learning

• The explanation for "free software" is simple — a person who has grasped the idea of "free speech, not free beer" will not get it wrong again.

  — Richard Stallman

• 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.

  — Richard Stallman

• The hard part of programming is the same regardless of the language.

  — Richard Stallman

• GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution.

  — Richard Stallman

• I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it.

  — Richard Stallman

• To have the choice between proprietary software packages, is being able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master. And in the area of computing, freedom means not using proprietary software.

  — Richard Stallman

• I have not seen anyone assume that all the citizens of New York are guilty of murder, violence, robbery, perjury, or writing proprietary software.

  — Richard Stallman

• 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.

  — Richard Stallman

• 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.

  — Richard Stallman

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

  — Richard Stallman

• I always expect to lose. I fight anyway, and sometimes I win.

  — Richard Stallman

• Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

  — Richard Stallman

• Using GPL is encroaching on our rights to encroach on yours.

  — Richard Stallman

• 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.

  — Richard Stallman

• Friend don't let companies spy on friends.

  — Richard Stallman

• You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi vi vi is the text editor of the beast.

  — Richard Stallman

• I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.

  — Richard Stallman

• People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.

  — Richard Stallman

• A lot of people think of a computer as just a tool, and they don't ask themselves who decides what they can do with the tool and what they can't do with the tool.

  — Richard Stallman

• Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.

  — Richard Stallman