Ричард Столлмен (Richard Matthew Stallman) (р.1953) — основатель проекта GNU ("GNU Is Not Unix", 1984 г.), основатель Фонда Свободного ПО (Free Software Foundation, 1985 г.), лауреат премии МакАртура (1990 г.), премии ACM Grace Murray Hopper's Award (1991 г.).

A Philosophical GNU

``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free'' as in ``free speech,'' not as in ``free beer.'':
  • freedom 0: use software for any purpose
  • freedom 1: study software (sources required)
  • freedom 2: distribute software
  • freedom 3: improve software to public benefit (sources required)
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What do they mean when they say "pirate"? They're saying that helping your neighbor is the moral equivalent of attacking a ship.

Эрик Реймонд (Eric Steven Raymond) (р. 1957 г.) — автор знаменитой статьи "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (1997 г.), один из основателей движения Open Source Initiative (1998 г).

Open Source Initiative

  • Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
  • Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
  • Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
  • ``Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away'' (Antoine de Saint-Exupery).
  • When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
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Линус Торвальдс (Linus Benedict Torvalds) (р. 1969  г.) — автор ядра Linux (1991 г.), на котором основана свободная операционная система GNU/Linux.

Tux the penguin

  • Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
  • Software is like sex; it's better when it's free.
  • I'm basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do.
  • We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.
  • Talk is cheap. Show me the code.
  • Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.