Free Software as Part of the Anarchist Toolkit

“Contrast this with the fruits of the free software movement so
far, where the means of production is back in the hands of the
ordinary people -well programmers at least but who are not driven
by the motive of profit but seem instead to be acting out the human
values of creativity, inquisitiveness and solidarity and sharing.
Instead of the destructive products some of which were listed
above, I think it would be fair to say that the products produced
have enhanced human culture, and helped in the exchanged of ideas
and further advancement of communication amongst and between people
directly. When I say this, I am thinking of course of software like
the Mozilla/Firefox browser, Apache webserver (reckoned 50% of all
webservers are run on Apache), Perl and PHP programming languages,
various free music players, email programs (Mozilla Thunderbird),
ftp software, wikis, blogs, free publishing tools, free image,
video and audio players and editing tools (gvim) and loads of other
stuff. And of course Linux. And this has not been restricted to
just the English speaking Western world because a lot of this
software has been translated into numerous languages and the
benefits of this intellectual capital is available to all the
countries of the world.

“And yet potentially this is really only the beginning…”

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