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In terms of effect on the world, it's very good that I've lived. And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn't do it. But I sure wish I hadn't had so much pain.

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
World
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Hadn
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More quotes by Richard Stallman

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For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
Richard Stallman
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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 Stallman
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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.
Richard Stallman
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Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.
Richard Stallman
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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.
Richard Stallman
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The desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.
Richard Stallman
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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'.
Richard Stallman
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Our mailing lists (and their repeater newsgroups) are only for the purpose of promoting proprietary software.
Richard Stallman
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My favorite programming languages are Lisp and C. However, since around 1992 I have worked mainly on free software activism, which means I am too busy to do much programming. Around 2008 I stopped doing programming projects.
Richard Stallman
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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.
Richard Stallman
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Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.
Richard Stallman
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Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.
Richard Stallman
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Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air.
Richard Stallman
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The GNU GPL was not designed to be open source.
Richard Stallman
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Paying isn’t wrong, and being paid isn’t wrong. Trampling other people’s freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.
Richard Stallman
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Without absolute certainty, what do we do? We do the best we can. Injustice is happening now suffering is happening now. We have choices to make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral.
Richard Stallman
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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.
Richard Stallman
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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.
Richard Stallman
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If ebooks mean that readers' freedom must either increase or decrease, we must demand the increase.
Richard Stallman
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Anything that prevents you from being friendly, a good neighbour, is a terror tactic.
Richard Stallman