Richard Stallman Software Quotations

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users dont have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.

The idea of free software is that users of computing deserve freedom. They deserve in particular to have control over their computing. And proprietary software does not allow users to have control of their computing.

One basis for society is that of helping your neighbor -- but in the software world this is piracy. To prevent this, the U.S. is putting in place practices which are like those in the former Soviet Union -- computerized guards, propaganda in favor of licensing, rewards for informing on co-workers, and penalties which make distributing software as serious a crime as armed robbery.

I founded the free software movement, a movement for freedom to cooperate. Open source was a reaction against our idealism. We are still here and the open-source people have not wiped us out.

We've partly removed the inconveniences of preventing a user from combining code from various free software packages.

A smartphone is a computer - it's not built using a computer - the job it does is the job of being a computer. So, everything we say about computers, that the software you run should be free - you should insist on that - applies to smart phones just the same. And likewise to those tablets.

The free world welcomes Sun's decision to use the Free Software Foundation's GPL.

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

You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software.

In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.