Mitchell Baker Quotes

The idea of free software is that users of computing deserve freedom. They deserve in particular to have control over their computing. And proprietary software does not allow users to have control of their computing.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless.

To be able to choose between proprietary software packages is to be able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master.

I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the pay for use binary shareware programs.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

The financial firms—the same ones who were involved in the 2008 meltdown—are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And frankly, they own the place.

To have the choice between proprietary software packages, is being able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master. And in the area of computing, freedom means not using proprietary software.

If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the "owner" of the program, that controls the program and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.

The people who think that the power of big business is enormous are mistaken

We had the controlling shares but we weren’t in control.

Technical standards can be designed either to foster openness or to permit censorship and surveillance. In short, the Internet, before it is physically constructed from routers and cables, is made up of values.

One aspect of modern life which has gone far to stifle men is the rapid growth of tremendous corporations ... The disappearance of free enterprise has led to a submergence of the individual in the impersonal corporation.

The President [FDR] is willing to take what Congress will give him and Congress will give him only what big business is willing that he should have.

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of the country.

To control the American market is to own America.

Historians, studying us, will say that we allowed corporations to become the government.

The Department of State has become a concession hunting agency for the Standard Oil Company

The Republican Party is the open and avowed handmaiden of the trusts.

Arrangements to make people pay for using a program, including licensing of copies, always incur a tremendous cost to society through the cumbersome mechanisms necessary to figure out how much (that is, which programs) a person must pay for. And only a police state can force everyone to obey them. Consider a space station where air must be manufactured at great cost: charging each breather per liter of air may be fair, but wearing the metered gas mask all day and all night is intolerable even if everyone can afford to pay the air bill. And the TV cameras everywhere to see if you ever take the mask off are outrageous. It's better to support the air plant with a head tax and chuck the masks. Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.

The patent system was established to encourage inventors to disclose the details of their inventions. Its purpose was to help society rather than to help inventors. At the time, the life span of 17 years for a patent was short compared with the rate of advance of the state of the art. Since patents are an issue only among manufacturers, for whom the cost and effort of a license agreement are small compared with setting up production, the patents often do not do much harm. They do not obstruct most individuals who use patented products.

The financial interests have captured the government institutions.

But that's the whole point of corporatism: to try and remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run —which include production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything—are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public.

...it is a government by the corporations, for the corporations.