Decoding Liberation
Book: Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software. Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter. Routledge, 2007.
URL = http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~bcfoss/DL/DLintroduction.html
Description
By the authors:
"In this book we take free software to be a liberatory enterprise in several dimensions. While the freedom to inspect source code is most commonly associated with FOSS, of more interest to us are the political, artistic, and scientific freedoms it brings in its wake. The title of this book reflects this promise: in a world that is increasingly encoded, our free software carries much potential for liberation. Granted, claims about technology and freedom are nothing new; much of the early hype about the Internet was rhetoric of this kind. But what is important about the recurrence of such hyperbolic enthusiasm is that it is clearly articulated evidence of a desire for technology to live up to its potential as a liberatory force.
With this book, the investigation of free software becomes broader than those conducted by lawyers, economists, businessmen, and cultural theorists: FOSS carries many philosophical implications that must be carefully explored and explicated. FOSS, most importantly, focuses attention on that often misunderstood creature: software. To understand it as mere machine instructions, to ignore its creative potential and it power to enforce political and social control, is to indulge in a problematic blindness.
We do not contend that "knowledge [or information] just wants to be free," that this is a fait accompli. But we do want to understand what this freedom might be and how we might go about achieving it. While the potential of free software is often alluded to, it is not fully understood. This book is partly an expression of a utopian hope, partly the expression of the fear that a liberatory moment is slipping away." (http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~bcfoss/DL/DLintroduction.html)
Summary
By the authors:
"In the first chapter, we begin with a history of software development as an industrial process, characterizing the emergence of the GNU free software project in the 1980s as a natural step in the evolution of software, one that challenged the anomalous proprietary software regimes that had taken hold in the late 1970s. We show how this history reflects the value of cooperative work, and track the slow move towards the eventual commodification of software; while free software is legitimately regarded as a radical intervention in the software industry, it may also be thought of as a return to softwareÕs roots. We investigate the political economies of software, examining the extent to which FOSS invokes or revises traditional notions of property and production. In our narrative, the 1998 schism between the free software and open source movements--where a faction within the free software community changed tactics and language to court commercial interests--is a crucial event. We examine the potential for co-optation that the open source movement has created, drawing it apart from the free software moment, which remains committed to an anti-technocratic, emancipatory, yet pragmatic vision.
In Chapter Two, we examine the ethical positions enshrined in the constitutive documents of the free and open source movements. The freedoms enumerated in the Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition provide normative ethical guidance to the FOSS community.
Building on these definitions, free software licensing schemes grant a suite of rights and freedoms, to programmers and users alike, that are much broader than those granted by proprietary software licensing schemes. At a finer granularity, the particular licenses take different approaches to protecting these rights and freedoms; hence, choosing a license is an important responsibility of the free software developer. The discussion in this chapter is intended both to support this decision-making and to assess the ethical implications of the rhetorical character of these documents.
Chapter Three addresses the FOSS creative process, which facilitates group collaboration and innovation through unique organizational structures. This examination relies on an analysis of the aesthetics of software in general, invoking notions of beauty in science, and uncovering the meaning of "beautiful code" through the testimonials of programmers themselves. FOSSÕs social and technical organization carries the greatest potential to produce such beautiful code through its affordances for programmers' artistic freedoms.
Building on the previous chapter, in Chapter Four we argue that both the creative possibilities and the scientific objectivity of computing are compromised by proprietary software and the closed standards it proliferates. One necessary condition for the objectivity of science is that its practices and products remain public, open for mutual critique within the scientific community. But the industrialization of computer science and the application of intellectual "property" that is its natural consequence prevent the public practice of computer science. Defenses of commercial computer science on grounds of economic expediency ring hollow when we realize that these have never distinguished science from pseudo-science. We speculate on the shape of computing practices in a world in which all code is free, and show that it leads to a radically different conception of computing as a science.
In the final chapter, we address the role of free software in a world infused with code. In this world, distinctions between human and machine evanesce: personal and social freedoms in this domain are precisely the freedoms granted or restricted by software. In the cyborg world, software will retain its regulatory role, but it will also become a language of interaction with our extended cyborg selves. We point out that questions about the cyborg world's polity are essential questions of technology; the language of the cyborg world must be free, as natural languages are, in order to protect the liberties of our cyborg selves. We argue for transparency in governmentality in the information age and show that free software embodies the anarchist ideal of eliminating the indiscriminate, opaque application of power." (http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~bcfoss/DL/DLintroduction.html)