All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights.
Snow is so beautiful, it doesn’t have to be useful.
Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic.
I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.
Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.
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.
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.
Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance.
No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs.
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.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won’t leave you alone.
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.
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.
If in my lifetime the problem of non-free software is solved, I could perhaps relax and write software again. But I might instead try to help deal with the world’s larger problems. Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it.
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.
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.
Laws that oppress people have no moral authority.
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.
I’m trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage.
Because I don’t believe that it’s really desirable to have security on a computer, I shouldn’t be willing to help uphold the security regime.