Announcement

I am Richard Stallman. I am a programmer, a free software activist, and a free culture activist.

I am also a father, a husband, and a human being.

I am writing this announcement to explain why I am leaving the GNU Project.

I am leaving because I am no longer able to devote the time and energy that I need to the GNU Project. I am leaving because the core beliefs of the GNU Project have been betrayed. I am leaving because of the people who work in and around the GNU Project.

Specifically, this is an announcement for my friends and colleagues who work on GNU compilers and GNU build systems. They are the people I have had the privilege of working with for the past decade. They are the people with whom I have had the privilege of discussing and arguing about how to improve software freedom and about how to make the world a better place.

I am also leaving because the GNU Project failed to take my advice.

To understand why I am leaving, you need to understand why I founded the GNU Project in the first place.

I founded the GNU Project in 1985 because I thought that software should be free. That was not the prevailing view, when I founded the project. The prevailing view at the time was that software had a price and was sold to users. Software was sold by businesses in terms of licenses, which were licenses to the monopolies in various industries. That was the only way that software could be provided to people, if you accepted the prevailing view.

I did not accept the prevailing view.

When I first decided to create the GNU Project, there was no idea to make software free. I did not expect the project to have any impact at all. I assumed that my project would fail. I expected the software industry to continue as it always had.

When my friends and I created the GNU Project, we did not have any idea what would happen. We did not expect anything would happen. All we wanted to do was to make a few copies of GNU, and see what would happen.