Science Quote by Richard Stallman

Leave it to Richard Stallman to frame everyday social warmth as a battleground. In his world, “being friendly” and “a good neighbour” aren’t Hallmark virtues; they’re the baseline conditions for a functional civic commons. So when he labels the forces that block that friendliness as “terror tactic,” he’s deliberately yanking a word associated with bombs and hostage videos into the realm of software licenses, nondisclosure agreements, and “don’t share” culture. It’s polemic, yes, but it’s also strategic: Stallman wants you to feel the moral stakes in the mundane.

The intent is to reclassify certain forms of control as violence-by-other-means. Not physical harm, but coercion that works through fear, isolation, and enforced mistrust. If your tools, contracts, or institutions make it risky to help the person next door - to share code, fix a bug, teach someone, or even lend a file - then the system has succeeded in making community behavior deviant. That inversion is the real subtext: proprietary regimes don’t just sell products; they manufacture antisocial norms and call them “professional.”

Context matters. Stallman’s free software crusade grew out of lab culture where collaboration was oxygen, then watched it be fenced off by corporate ownership and legal threats. “Terror tactic” is his blunt way of saying: the point isn’t merely restricting access; it’s disciplining people into silence. The line works because it refuses technical neutrality and treats friendliness as a political right, not a personality trait.