A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness—not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean “security breaker.”

Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.

I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute.

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.

The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.

Laws that oppress people have no moral authority.

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users dont have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.