Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--19b1c5-So I looked for another altern/en

So I looked for another alternative, and there was an obvious one. I could leave the software field and do something else. Now I had no other special noteworthy skills, but I'm sure I could have become a waiter. [Laughter] Not at a fancy restaurant; they wouldn't hire me, [Laughter] but I could be a waiter somewhere. And many programmers, they say to me, &ldquo;The people who hire programmers demand this, this and this. If I don't do those things, I'll starve.&rdquo; It's literally the word they use. Well, you know, as a waiter, you're not going to starve. [Laughter] So, really, they're in no danger. But &mdash; and this is important, you see &mdash; because sometimes you can justify doing something that hurts other people by saying otherwise something worse is going to happen to me. You know, if you were really going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software. [Laughter] If somebody's pointing a gun at you, then I would say, it's forgivable. [Laughter] But, I had found a way that I could survive without doing something unethical, so that excuse was not available. So I realized, though, that being a waiter would be no fun for me, and it would be wasting my skills as an operating system developer. It would avoid misusing my skills. Developing proprietary software would be misusing my skills. Encouraging other people to live in the world of proprietary software would be misusing my skills. So it's better to waste them than misuse them, but it's still not really good.