Richard Stallman Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.”
-- Richard StallmanSource : Richard Stallman (2002). “Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman”, p.31, Lulu.com
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“I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.”
-- Richard StallmanSource : "O'Reilly Open Source Conference: Day 3". www.apacheweek.com. July 26, 2002.
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“Snow is so beautiful, it doesn't have to be useful.”
-- Richard StallmanSource : Parliament Hill Speech, Ottawa, Canada, June 2, 2009.
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“Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not enough - you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.”
-- Richard StallmanSource : "On Hacking". Personal Website, stallman.org.
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“All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can't begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can't see how others have done it.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“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 StallmanSource : "Free Software Is Even More Important Now" by Richard Stallman, www.gnu.org. September 2013.
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“It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".”
-- Richard Stallman -
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“While corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance in technology is an opening for them to further restrict its users.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“The GNU GPL was not designed to be "open source".”
-- Richard Stallman -
“My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“By the way, I hope you all know about the worldwide boycott of Coca Cola company for things like murdering union organizers in Colombia. See the site killercoke.org.”
-- Richard Stallman -
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“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 -
“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do,”
-- Richard Stallman -
“The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.”
-- Richard Stallman -
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“Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“I don’t have a problem with someone using their talents to become successful, I just don’t think the highest calling is success. Things like freedom and the expansion of knowledge are beyond success, beyond the personal. Personal success is not wrong, but it is limited in importance, and once you have enough of it it is a shame to keep striving for that, instead of for truth, beauty, or justice.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
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“A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness—not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean “security breaker.—
-- Richard Stallman -
“The paradigm of competition is a race: by rewarding the winner, we encourage everyone to run faster. When capitalism really works this way, it does a good job; but its defenders are wrong in assuming it always works this way.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.”
-- Richard StallmanSource : "Facebook Is a Surveillance Engine, Not Friend: Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation". Interview with Sriram Srinivasan and Sangeetha Kandavel, economictimes.indiatimes.com. February 07, 2012.
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“Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.”
-- Richard StallmanSource : Political notes from 2011, stallman.org. October 6, 2011.
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“GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.”
-- Richard Stallman -
“It doesn't take special talents to reproduce--even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of. It helps more people, too.”
-- Richard Stallman
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