Are the founding principles of open source – the ability to share, distribute, modify and reproduce information – transferable to agriculture? If in the computer field, free software is now a reality, this paper examines whether and how agricultural tools can be created and disseminated through ‘free’ processes. We look at two case studies: a management software for farmers developed by – and called – Ekylibre; and a cooperative that provides farmers with machines that can be self-constructed, l’Atelier Paysan. Both structures are studied by retracing their history and form of organization, studying how they enact the principles of open source, and by describing their tools within their economic and political context.
Ekylibre and Atelier Paysan refer both to the open source movement and are devoted to knowledge sharing - knowledge that is disseminated via websites, demonstrations, trainings, and forums. They are both structures that are closely related to communities of users. However, at a closer look, we observe that the social architecture, the materiality and the economics of the tools developed by Ekylibre and Atelier Paysan differ. 
In the academic literature, open source is usually conceptualized as a political and ethical project, depending on a specific form of sociability and community. The article argues that we need to empirically describe and analytically problematize how open source is materialized in individual cases. If we can see open source tools as political objects, the term political does not refer to the same thing. While Ekylibre and Atelier Paysan are both related to user communities, they are organized and ‘economicized’ differently. The idea of open source is not only, in practice, translated into tools that aim to be free, shareable, collective, etc. We need, so we argue, to examine how and to what extent open source tools can be qualified as such and thereby show what the term ‘political’ signifies from case to case.