Quotes About Free Software

#1. 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

#2. Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.

Linus Torvalds

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Richard Stallman

#10. When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price.

Richard M. Stallman

#11. 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

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

Laura Poitras

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

Andy Hertzfeld

#14. 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

#15. Defect-free software does not exist.

Wietse Venema

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

David F. Emery

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

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

Richard Stallman

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

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

Bill Gates

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Richard Stallman

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

Richard Stallman

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

Evgeny Morozov

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. software is like sex : it's better when it's free..

Linus Torvalds

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

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

Fred Wilson

#48. 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

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

Darl McBride