If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
Richard StallmanRead
Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community. So it's free as in freedom.
Interpretation
Free software prioritizes user freedom and community solidarity over mere cost.
This quote by Richard Stallman emphasizes that 'free software' should not only be understood in terms of cost, but instead as a commitment to ensuring that users have freedom to use, modify, and share software. Through this lens, the idea of freedom extends into fostering a sense of community, where users support each other, reinforcing social solidarity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation on the importance of open source software.
If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Divided because each user is forbidden to redistribute it to others, and helpless because the users can't change it since they don't have the source code. They can't study what it really does. So the proprietary program is a system of unjust power.
EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.
One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless.
Proprietary software is an injustice.
Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.
If I had time and a hammer, I'd track down every bootleg copy and smash it.
If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it's only a click away.
All countries will eventually need to rebuild their growth models around digital technologies and the human capital that supports their deployment and expansion.
We want to build systems that can generalize to a new task. Being able to do things with much less data and with much less computation is going to be interesting and important.
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
The cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. ... The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other.
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