Open Source and C&W The following is an exploration of the open source movement. It is not intended to convince those who are advocates of intellectual property to embrace open source principles. Rather it is targeted at those of like mind who might be willing to accept statements such as the following by Richard Stallman, the author of the GNU General Public License:

Publishers don't have 'an unquestionable natural right to own' and control software ... we have a right to question the type of society that copyright of software creates ... good software can be created under a different production model than one which involves corporate ownership and control (54).