"I first met Richard Stallman, a denizen of MIT's AI Lab, in 1983. Even then he was bemoaning the sad decline of hacker culture and felt that the commercialization of software was a crime. When I spoke to him that year, as the computer industry was soaring, he looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t believe that software can be owned.” I called him “the last of the true hackers” and assumed the world would soon squash him. Was I ever wrong. Stallman's crusade for free software has continued to inform the ongoing struggles over intellectual property and won him a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” He founded the Free Software Foundation and wrote the GNU operating system, which garnered widespread adoption after Linus Torvalds wrote Linux to run with it; the combination is used in millions of devices. More important, perhaps, is that Stallman provided the intellectual framework that led to the open source movement, a critical element of modern software and the Internet itself. If the software world had saints, Stallman would have been beatified long ago."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Activists from the United StatesAcademics from the United StatesPeople from New York CityProgrammers from the United StatesFree software activists
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Steven Levy, in "Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists, in WIRED (April 19, 2010)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Richard Stallman
130 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Richard Stallman →
Related Quotes
"I didn't receive the DEC message, but I can't imagine I would have been bothered if I have. I get tons of uninteresti…"
"Well, Geoff forwarded me a copy of the DEC message, and I eat my words. I sure would have minded it! Nobody should be…"
"What they had in common was mainly love of excellence and programming. They wanted to make their programs that they u…"
"GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing…"
"To avoid horrible confusion, please pronounce the G in the word GNU when it is the name of this project."
"I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Soft…"
"GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will b…"
"Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air."
"Hundreds of thousands of babies are born every day. While the whole phenomenon is menacing, one of them by itself is …"
"I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be go…"