Quotes & Sayings About Free Software

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. — Richard Stallman

Software production is like any other production the preceded it, no raw materials are required, no time is required and no effort is required, you can make a million Copies of Software instantaneously for free and its very unique about that. — John McAfee

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. — Bill Gates

If you build a car, you can only sell it once. If you paint a fence, you only get paid for it once. If you create a piece of software that's essentially free to reproduce, you can keep getting paid over and over perpetually. — Markus Persson

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. — Richard Stallman

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. — 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

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. — Eben Moglen

Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software. — Fred Wilson

While sanctions against Iran and Syria are intended to constrain those countries' governments, they have had the unfortunate side effect of constraining activists' access to free online software and services used widely across the Middle East, including browsers, online chat applications, and online storage services. — Rebecca MacKinnon

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

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

software is like sex : it's better when it's free.. — Linus Torvalds

Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va. — Evgeny Morozov

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

There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach. — Linus Torvalds

I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect. — Richard M. Stallman

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

Uruguay is one of the biggest producers of software. We are breaking with the neoliberal model. We do not believe in free trade. — Hugo Chavez

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. — Jimmy Wales

Free software is part of a broader phenomenon, which is a shift toward recognizing the value of shared work. Historically, shared stuff had a very bad name. The reputation was that people always abused shared things, and in the physical world, something that is shared and abused becomes worthless. In the digital world, I think we have the inverse effect, where something that is shared can become more valuable than something that is closely held, as long as it is both shared and contributed to by everybody who is sharing in it. — Mark Shuttleworth

bought one of the software programs, and worked the system. That particular software covered more than 300,000 available scholarships. She narrowed the database search until she had 1,000 scholarships to apply for. She spent the whole summer filling out applications and writing essays. She literally applied for 1,000 scholarships. Denise was turned down by 970, but she got 30, and those 30 scholarships paid her $38,000. She went to school for free while her next-door neighbor sat and whined that no money was available for school and eventually got a student loan. — Dave Ramsey

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. — Richard Stallman

We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony. — Matt Mullenweg

A good standalone plugin can also make you a fair amount of money. Many developers make a decent living by simply maintaining and updating one or two crucial plugins that are far better than anything available for free. — Robert Duchnik

I believe our basic information, our 'software', should be free and open for everyone to play with, to compete with, to try and make products from. I do not believe it should be under the control of one person. — John Sulston

Torvalds decided to use the GNU General Public License, not because he fully embraced the free-sharing ideology of Stallman (or for that matter his own parents) but because he thought that letting hackers around the world get their hands on the source code would lead to an open collaborative effort that would make it a truly awesome piece of software. "My reasons for putting Linux out there were pretty selfish," he said. "I didn't want the headache of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work. I wanted help."136 — Walter Isaacson

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. — Richard Stallman

Defect-free software does not exist. — Wietse Venema

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

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. — Linus Torvalds

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. — Hugo Chavez

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

It is a free software program. You don't have to pay in order to download and install Python, or implement it on your application. Additionally, it will not cost you a thing to modify or redistribute this programming language, because although it is protected by a copyright, it is distributed with an open source permit. — Clarence Patterson

Sharing the code just seems like The Right Thing to Do, it costs us rather little, but it benefits a lot of people in sometimes very significant ways. There are many university research projects, proof of concept publisher demos, and new platform test beds that have leveraged the code. Free software that people value adds wealth to the world. — John Carmack

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

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver. — Linus Torvalds

In 2011, the NASSCOM team introduced me to Aloke Bajpai, who, like others on his young team, cut his teeth working for Western technology companies but returned to India on a bet that he could start something - he just didn't know what. The result was Ixigo, a travel search service that can run on the cheapest cell phones and helps Indians book the lowest-cost fares, whether it is a farmer who wants to go by bus or train for a few rupees from Chennai to Bangalore or a millionaire who wants to go by plane to Paris. Ixigo is today the biggest travel search platform in India, with millions of users. To build it, Bajpai leveraged the supernova, using free open-source software, Skype, and cloud-based office tools such as Google Apps and social media marketing on Facebook. They "enabled us to grow so much faster with no money," he told me. It — Thomas L. Friedman

The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing. — Matt Mullenweg

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

Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. — Richard Stallman

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

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

Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software. — Linus Torvalds

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

Software options proliferate extremely easily - too easily, in fact - because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment. — Brian Eno

Like many older fans of Free Software and Open Source, I have discovered that it is really only free in the sense that the time you spend on it is worthless. — Erik Naggum

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. — Richard M. 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

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. — Richard Stallman

Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom. — Richard Stallman

For Google, the problem with being a free, abundant, and rather infinite set of services is that it's hard to create much of a stir about anything. There are so many major software service options under the 'more' menu on the Gmail page that they've had to go and add a final item called 'even more.' — Douglas Rushkoff

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. — Richard Stallman

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. — 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

Many users of the GNU/Linux system will not have heard the ideas of free software. They will not be aware that we have ideas, that a system exists because of ethical ideals, which were omitted from ideas associated with the term 'open source.' — Richard Stallman

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. — Richard Stallman

While I personally believe strongly in the philosophy and ideology of the Free Software movement, you can't win people over just on philosophy; you have to have a better product, too. — Matt Mullenweg

In June 1991 he took the drastic step of asking a friend to post PGP on a Usenet bulletin board. PGP is just a piece of software, and so from the bulletin board it could be downloaded by anyone for free. PGP was now loose on the Internet. — Simon Singh

The free software community should be supported more widely. I'm totally in solidarity with what they do. — Laura Poitras