The gnu-manifesto (1985) is both a project announcement and a philosophical argument. As an announcement, it declared stallman's intention to build a complete free Unix-compatible operating system called GNU. As a philosophical argument, it advanced a set of claims about the social nature of software, the ethics of programming, and the relationship between sharing knowledge and human welfare. This entry focuses on the latter.
The Core Argument
The manifesto's philosophical core is this: software is a form of knowledge, and knowledge is most useful when it can be shared. Restricting software is therefore harmful — it prevents people from learning how programs work, prevents cooperation between programmers, and imposes artificial scarcity on something that can be copied without limit at near-zero cost.
stallman distinguishes this from a claim about price. The manifesto explicitly addresses the programmer's livelihood question: he does not argue that programmers should not be paid, but that proprietary licensing is not the only or best mechanism for funding programming. Alternatives he mentions include consulting, support services, and voluntary contributions — anticipating what would later be called the open source business model, but framed entirely in ethical rather than economic terms.
Against the "Information Wants to Be Free" Reading
The manifesto is often conflated with the slogan "information wants to be free," associated with Stewart Brand. stallman's argument is more specific and more rigorous. He is not making a metaphysical claim about information; he is making an ethical claim about software specifically, grounded in the four-freedoms framework: users have a right to control the software they use because software controls what they can do with their computers.
The manifesto does not argue that all intellectual property is wrong or that authors have no rights. It argues that the specific form of intellectual property represented by proprietary software licensing — restricting copying, modification, and redistribution of functional programs — is harmful enough to be worth fighting against through the creation of a complete alternative.
The Social Harm Argument
One of the manifesto's most consequential passages argues that refusing to share a useful program is as antisocial as refusing to help a neighbor. This is not merely rhetorical: stallman develops a systematic account of why software sharing is cooperative and why its restriction is harmful:
1. Copying costs nothing, so restriction creates artificial scarcity. 2. Users cannot fix, improve, or understand software they cannot study. 3. Programmers who must keep code secret cannot build on each other's work. 4. The division between software producers and users is bad for both.
This social harm argument is the foundation for stallman's later claim that proprietary software is "unjust" — a moral category, not just an economic inefficiency.
Political Economy
The manifesto engages, briefly but directly, with the political economy of software. stallman acknowledges that the existing copyright system finances software development but argues this is not an argument that the system is just — only that it currently functions. He sketches alternatives and argues that the good in software (the useful functionality) does not depend on the restriction, only the funding mechanism does.
This argument was prescient: it anticipated by a decade the debates that would emerge when Linux showed that high-quality software could be produced cooperatively. eric-raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (1997) made a similar economic argument but framed it in terms of development efficiency rather than ethics — a difference stallman has always insisted is more than stylistic.
Enduring Relevance
stallman has annotated the GNU Manifesto repeatedly over the years (the version on gnu.org includes footnotes addressing objections raised since 1985). The core philosophical argument has remained consistent, but he has updated it to address: the success of Linux as evidence for his economic claims, the rise of the Web and network-distributed software, and the development of DRM and tivoization as new forms of restriction.
The manifesto is the foundational document of the free software movement — not a technical specification but a statement of values that situates software freedom in a broader account of human cooperation and social ethics. See also hacker-ethic-mit for the cultural context from which the manifesto emerged.