Free Software Quotes

Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes.

Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance.

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

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.

It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it;

it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free.

Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go.

We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.

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.

This is what our customers are asking for to take them to the next level and free them from the bondage of mainframe and client-server software.

The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less.

Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source.

You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

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.

I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement.

We also exchange oil for software technology.

Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. We believe in fair trade and exchange, not competition but cooperation. I'm not giving away oil for free. Just using oil, first to benefit our people, to relieve poverty.

Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software.

We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade.

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.”

Paying isn’t wrong, and being paid isn’t wrong.

Trampling other people’s freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.

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.

The Internet is a powerful example of free speech and the free market in action;

it is curious that the Net has alarmed the lawmakers of a nation founded on those principles.

I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about "open source" thinking that I work under that banner.

While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.

As the commercial confrontation between [free software] and software-that's-a-product becomes more fierce, patent law's going to be the terrain on which a big piece of the war's going to be fought. Waterloo is here somewhere.

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.

Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.

Software is like sex. It's only good when it's for free.

At the end of the day, the GPL is not about making software free; it's about destroying value.

It's clear that other problems such as [.

..] the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software.

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

While we bemoan the decline of literacy, computers discount words in favor of pictures and pictures in favor of video. While we fret about the decreasing cogency of public debate, computers dismiss linear argument and promote fast, shallow romps across the information landscape. While we worry about basic skills, we allow into the classroom software that will do a student's arithmetic or correct his spelling.

There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.

One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.

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.

The free software community should be supported more widely.

I’m totally in solidarity with what they do.

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'.