«...For free software has two roles.1) and it is doing this already, is to make available the tools to spread out and share information as widely and as easily as possible, thereby making society more informed and achieving rapid (and needed) culture change and 2) to help the transformation from the current fragmentary representative and badly functioning democracy to one of participatory democra

"Over at Sphere of Networks, I published a text that tries to give a simple overview of the workings of information production in the age of the internet, covering everything from free software to free culture. This article is a slightly modified version of a chapter of this text.

«...The Free Software movement is an example of an emergent movement with anarchist characteristics.

Free software is software you can study, modify and share without restriction. But unlike proprietary software, there is no big budget marketing campaign behind it. Rather, people discover it and come to value the freedom it provides. What are these people's motivations for working on free software? Why is community and sharing so important? Why should everyone be using free software?

"...The core ideals of free software are very strongly aligned with the core ideas of anarchism: the ideas of mutual aid and sharing combined with essential freedoms [...] At this point, I think can say that the key difference is how they treated the opposing forces. Under the anarchists, there was the widespread burning of churches and violence against Catholicism.

The Free Knowledge, Free Technology Conference (FKFT) is the first international event which will centre on the production and sharing of educational and training materials in the field of Free Software and Open Standards.

"...Propelled by their victory, the students started the group, which they named after the 2004 book “Free Culture” by Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School. The book applies principles from the so-called free software movement — the idea that computer users should have the liberty to copy, distribute and modify software as they wish — to all aspects of culture..."

When the idea of sharing software comes up, people frequently break out in debates over Capitalism vs. Communism. It doesn't take long before someone starts equating - derisively, no less - sharing software with Communism. But since when did the Communists corner the market on sharing?

"Free" has been a founding concept in the Linux world since before there was Linux — or GNU/Linux, if you prefer. In his history of the GNU project, Richard M. Stallman begins, "When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years.