Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--967667-Well, in the GNU project, if t/en

Well, in the GNU project, if that same thing had happened to GNU software, it would have been a failure, because our goal wasn't just to be popular; our goal was to give people liberty, and to encourage cooperation, to permit people to cooperate. Remember, never force anyone to cooperate with any other person, but make sure that everybody's allowed to cooperate, everyone has the freedom to do so, if he or she wishes. If millions of people were running non-free versions of GNU, that wouldn't be success at all. The whole thing would have been perverted into nothing like the goal.