Wealth & Money Quote by Richard Stallman

The line lands like a moral audit disguised as a career anecdote: Stallman isn’t bragging about turning down money so much as indicting an entire industry for normalizing harm as “just business.” The hook is the phrase “building walls” - a vivid, almost physical metaphor for proprietary software, paywalls, closed standards, and licensing regimes that convert cooperation into scarcity. He frames coding not as neutral craft but as social architecture: the same skills that can “amuse” can also enclose, gatekeep, and fracture communities.

Stallman’s intent is less self-portrait than recruitment poster. By staging the choice as one between wealth and a future pang of conscience, he offers a template for how technologists should evaluate their work: not by elegance, not by compensation, but by downstream human consequences. That’s the subtextual pressure point. The quote assumes a reader who has accepted the industry’s default story - that software is property first, public good second - and tries to make that story feel faintly shameful.

Context matters: Stallman’s free software movement emerged from early hacker culture, when sharing code was ordinary and institutional restrictions were the intrusion. His language turns that breach into an ethical crisis. “At the end of my career” is a long-view threat: you can cash checks now, but you’ll eventually have to live with the person you became. It’s persuasion by anticipatory regret, aimed squarely at engineers who’d prefer to stay apolitical.