Talk:Richard Stallman

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Based on years of conversations, I am convinced that part of the cause of the problem is the tendency to call the system Linux rather than GNU, and describe it as open source rather than free software.

Instead of worrying about what somebody else is going to do, which is not under your control, the important thing is, what are you going to decide about what is under your control?

« Les cons peuvent être vaincus mais ils n'admettent jamais l'être. »
- "Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it."

Protecting essential freedoms is always a matter of restricting the actions that would deny them.

We promote free software as an ethical and social issue. Computer users should always have the freedom to share and change the software they use. It's wrong to try to stop someone.

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.

Although the basic GNU/Linux system is free software, most of the GNU/Linux versions now available include a small amount of non-free software--just enough to spoil them as a way to attain freedom. But Linspire is in a class by itself; large and important parts of this system are non-free. No other GNU/Linux distribution has backslided so far away from freedom. Switching from MS Windows to Linspire does not bring you to freedom, it just gets you a different master.