Richard Stallman

I have met bright students in computer science who have never seen the source code of a large program. They may be good at writing small programs, but they can’t begin to learn the different skills of writing large ones if they can’t see how others have done it.

In fact, in the 1980s I often came across newly graduated computer science majors who had never seen a real program in their lives. They had only seen toy exercises, school exercises, because every real program was a trade secret.

I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way.

The free software community rejects the “priesthood of technology”, which keeps the general public in ignorance of how technology works; we encourage students of any age and situation to read the source code and learn as much as they want to know.

The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don’t know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don’t know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Lisp, you will understand what is lacking in most other languages.

Programming is programming. If you get good at programming, it doesn’t matter which language you learned it in, because you’ll be able to do programming in any language.

In 1971 when I joined the staff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, all of us who helped develop the operating system software, we called ourselves hackers. We were not breaking any laws, at least not in doing the hacking we were paid to do. We were developing software and we were having fun. Hacking refers to the spirit of fun in which we were developing software.