Science Quote by Richard Stallman

Stallman’s sentence reads like a disclaimer, but it’s really a line in the sand. He’s preempting the easiest caricature of his politics: that free software advocates are naive anti-capitalists who think programmers should live on applause. Instead, he grants the legitimacy of getting paid and even “maximizing” income, then immediately narrows the moral field to one charged word: “destructive.”

That word does heavy lifting. Stallman isn’t talking about destruction in the abstract; he’s pointing at business models that turn code into leverage against users: proprietary licensing that withholds source, DRM that criminalizes tinkering, “services” that trap data, patents that chill experimentation, and noncompetes that corral labor. In Stallman’s framework, these aren’t just market choices. They’re harms with downstream social costs: less autonomy, less security, less shared knowledge. The subtext is a moral hierarchy: profit is fine, coercion isn’t.

The phrasing also reveals his rhetorical strategy. He’s not asking permission from the market; he’s setting terms for ethical participation in it. By framing income-seeking as normal, he invites mainstream listeners in, then redefines the conversation around means rather than ends. The fight isn’t “money versus idealism.” It’s whether your revenue depends on locking people out of their own tools.

Context matters: this is Stallman defending the Free Software movement’s original animating claim that software freedom is a civil liberty issue, not a pricing scheme. He’s offering a capitalist-friendly on-ramp to a fundamentally rights-based critique of tech power.