Richard Stallman — "Proprietary software is a form of digital enslavement."
Proprietary software is a form of digital enslavement.
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More from Richard Stallman
"Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go."
"I exercise my authority over glibc very rarely – and when I have done so, I have talked with the official maintainers. So rarely that some of you thought that you are entirely autonomous. But that is …"
"Using a proprietary program is like being a prisoner in a cage, and the bars are made of code."
"I don't believe in intellectual property. I believe in copyright and patent, but not 'intellectual property'."
"The word 'cloud' is a marketing term for 'someone else's computer.'"
About Richard Stallman (born 1953)
American programmer who founded the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, whose copyleft GPL licensing made the modern Linux ecosystem possible. Closely associated with Linus Torvalds (Linux kernel creator who builds on GNU userland) and Eric S. Raymond (open-source advocate (The Cathedral and the Bazaar)). For an intellectual contrast, see Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder — Gates's 1976 Open Letter to Hobbyists arguing for software-as-property is the foundational document Stallman's GPL was specifically written to refute — the two opposing answers to 'who owns the code'.