Toward an Open Source Society

One of the oldest arguments against anarchism is that it is impractical, that without central authority to keep the peons in line any large project will dissolve into chaos and disorder. Yet the open source software movement provides modern day proof that anarchism works, even when not conducted by anarchists. Source code is the human readable text of a computer program, written by programmers and compiled into binary format for execution by the computer. Without the source code, it is nearly impossible to modify a computer program, or even understand how it works. Proprietary software vendors like Microsoft keep their source code confidential, distributing binary-only software to rob users of the ability to modify it for their own purposes.