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You’ve argued that this foregrounding of freedom radically differentiates your movement from so-called ‘open source’, which started later.

Open source is an amoral, depoliticized substitute for the free-software movement. It was explicitly started with that intent. It was a reaction campaign, …

What’s your definition of free software?

Free software is software that respects users’ freedom and community. It’s not about price. It’s libre, not gratis. With any program, there are two possibilities: either the users control the program, or the program controls the users. When the users co…

The community needs the technology—you can’t have a community in which software-sharing is your way of life unless you’ve got free software to do everything. The point is, the software had the purpose of making the community possible. But part of the idea was that I wanted everyone to be part of th…

Many did, but the others basically got worn down, and eventually gave in. Over the period of the seventies, the spirit of resistance got worn down in others, whereas it got strengthened in me.

How do you explain that?

I don’t know. I guess I had found something worth being loyal to, and I b…

Our way of dealing with kids coming in over Arpanet was to socialize them. We all participated in that. For example, there was a command you could type to tell the system to shut down in five minutes. The kids sometimes did that, and when they did we just cancelled the shutdown. They were amazed. T…