Richard Stallman Free Quotations

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.

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.

When I launched the development of the GNU system, I explicitly said the purpose of developing this system is so we can use our computers and have freedom, thus if you use some other free system instead but you have freedom, then it's a success. It's not popularity for our code but it's success for our goal.

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

designed to prohibit all free software. It covers only code that implements, precisely, the Microsoft formats, which means that a program under this license does not permit modification.

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