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! Att… - Richard Stallman

The War on Drugs has continued for some 20 years, and we see little prospect of peace, despite the fact that it has totally failed and given the US an imprisonment rate almost equal to Russia. I fear that the War on Copying could go on for decades as well. To end it, we will need to rethink the copyright system, based on the Constitution's view that it is meant to benefit the public, not the copyright owners. Today, one of the benefits the public wants is the use of computers to share copies.

GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.

I didn't single out Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft had nothing to do with it in the beginning. Microsoft in 1983 made a toy operating system for toy computers, and I hardly paid any attention to it.