Abstract | What does the hacker ethic have to do with anarchism? Why does Richard Stallman, an outstanding personality of the free software movement, described himself as an anarchist? We should not imagine the anarchists of the Free Software Movement to be like the cartoon image: A scruffy looking lunatic, with a crazy glint in his eyes and bristling with weapons. Instead of chaos, Stallman postulates a new form of order for the intellectual property in the terms of the hacker ethic - the access to knowledge should be free, decentralized, anti-bureaucratic and anti-authoritarian.
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