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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Using web applications may compromise your control over data and computing.
Richard Stallman's quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining control over one's own computing resources and data. He warns against reliance on web applications and proprietary software, advocating for personal computing with software that respects user freedom, thereby ensuring that individuals are not vulnerable to external control and surveillance.
Themes
ControlFreedomComputingSoftwarePrivacy
In practice
Example use cases
In a tech talk discussing the importance of open-source software.
More from Richard Stallman
All quotes →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.
Richard StallmanRead
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.
Richard StallmanRead
Proprietary software is an injustice.
Richard StallmanRead
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.
Richard StallmanRead
People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.
Richard StallmanRead
Similar quotes
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
Bill GatesRead
We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it.
Stephen HawkingRead
The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.
J. C. R. LickliderRead
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
Isaac AsimovRead
In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word "frustration".
Alan PerlisRead
It pleases me no end to have had some small impact on people's lives because these phones do make people's lives better. They promote productivity, they make people more comfortable, they make them feel safe and all of those things.
Martin CooperRead