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Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.

Richard Stallman

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Richard Stallman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: March 16
Activist
Blogger
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Free Sofware Activist
Inventor
Programmer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Richard M. Stallman
rms
Richard Matthew Stallman
St. iGNUcius
Chief GNUisance
Difficult
Something
Playfully
Hacking
Useful
Whether

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The GNU GPL was not designed to be open source.
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Would a dating service for people on the net be frowned upon by DCA? I hope not. But even if it is, don't let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.
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Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.
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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.
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Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. Don't bother us with politics, respond those who don't want to learn.
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Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.
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Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.
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Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance.
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Now that corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users.
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The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do.
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It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have hack value.
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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'.
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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.
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The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere extension language. It should be a real programming language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs. Because people will want to do that!
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Open source is a development methodology free software is a social movement.
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I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
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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.
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I did write some code in Java once, but that was the island in Indonesia.
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If ebooks mean that readers' freedom must either increase or decrease, we must demand the increase.
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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.
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