Richard Stallman quotes - page 7
The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says "no" to some of the things that people sometimes want to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing - that the GPL "excludes" some proprietary software developers who "need to be brought into the free software community."
But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter. Their decision to make software proprietary is a decision to stay out of our community. Being in our community means joining in cooperation with us; we cannot "bring them into our community" if they don't want to join.
What we can do is offer them an inducement to join. The GNU GPL is designed to make an inducement from our existing software: "If you will make your software free, you can use this code." Of course, it won't win 'em all, but it wins some of the time.
Richard Stallman
Free software permits students to learn how software works. Some students, on reaching their teens, want to learn everything there is to know about their computer and its software. They are intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they use every day. To learn to write good code, students need to read lots of code and write lots of code. They need to read and understand real programs that people really use. Only free software permits this.
Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, "The knowledge you want is a secret - learning is forbidden!” Free software encourages everyone to learn. The free software community rejects the "priesthood of technology”, which keeps the general public in ignorance of how technology works; we encourage students of any age and situation to read the source code and learn as much as they want to know. Schools that use free software will enable gifted programming students to advance.
Richard Stallman
Medical marijuana grower and activist Steve McWilliams killed himself last June, rather than face 6 months in prison with no marijuana to relieve his chronic pain. If you are ever in a situation like this, don't kill yourself in private. Make your death itself be a blow against the tyrant. Plead innocent; then kill yourself in the courtroom, with the jury and journalists watching, after defying the judge by shouting, "I'm a medical marijuana grower. You were going to make those 12 honest citizens your tools for evil, but I will save them from you. May my death be on your conscience for as long as you live."
Richard Stallman
Programming is programming. If you get good at programming, it doesn't matter which language you learned it in, because you'll be able to do programming in any language. The hard part of programming is the same regardless of the language. And if you have a talent for that, and you learned it here, you can take it over there. Oh, one thing: if you want to get a picture of a programming at its most powerful, you should learn Lisp or Scheme because they are more elegant and powerful than other languages.
Richard Stallman
