Richard Stallman - Free Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

View all Richard Stallman Quotes
While free software by any other name would give you the same freedom, it makes a big difference which name we use: different words convey different ideas.

Richard Stallman
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

Richard Stallman
Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.

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. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.

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
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
Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.

Richard Stallman
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
Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.

Richard Stallman
Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.

Richard Stallman