Free and Open Source Software
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) production, in which source code is made accessible through specific 'public' licensing methods, challenges the legal structure of corporate privatisation that governs much software production and distribution. Instead of using copyright to protect profits and corporate interests, it allows knowledge to circulate freely, for deployment and adaptation in diverse environments.
FLOSS software is created through the volunteer labor of hundreds of thousands of hackers working through the Internet in a global collective development process. Guided by a passion to learn and create, these hackers consider legal, open access to information to be indispensable to their craft. This fundamental requirement challenges, through a social domain where creativity and innovation thrive, the corporate belief that the exclusionary mechanisms of intellectual property law are indispensable for advancement and ingenuity.
One of the most important components of this social domain is the creation and application of licenses. These are legal devices that ensure that source code remains freely accessible. FLOSS licenses guarantee access to knowledge enabling exploration, and development, sustaining what hackers consider a social practice that fuses technological innovation with artistic creation. One of the most prevalent licenses is the GNU (General Public License) - also known as the copyleft - which gives users the freedom to see, modify, and distribute the source code and software licensed by it. Significantly, it also protects against future private enclosure by requiring that all derivative public revisions of copylefted software must also be subject to it.
Free software is thus "free" because it allows hackers to creatively innovate and build on the work of a community in a manner not usually possible with traditional proprietary software development restrictions. This achieves a form of productive freedom rooted in methodologies, values, techniques, and conventions constituted around the act of writing code. FLOSS has clearly demonstrated, through its vast adoption, that the mandates of profit should not dictate the pursuit, creation, and access of knowledge.
Despite the fact that FLOSS' well articulated ethical philosophy for openness has had a profound political impact especially through its widespread adoption and use, FLOSS has cleverly resisted political delineation into the traditional political categories of left, right, or centre. FLOSS attracts participants with divergent political affiliations and value systems both as contributors in development and as users. As long as license rules are followed, FLOSS holds no discrimination against user, organization, or particular types of use. Because of this Free Software has been embraced by a wide range of people who can additionally benefit from the freedom to modify and learn from the underlying source code. This has enabled FLOSS to explode from a niche and academic endeavor into a creative sphere of socio-political and technical influence bolstered by the Internet.
Equally important, FLOSS as a social practice speaks volumes about the diverse and culturally situated ways that humans collectively organize, create, share, and give. Classical economic models, such as rational choice theory, can't do justice to the depth and complexity of FLOSS social practices, exchanges, and collaborations. Its software, its philosophies, and its social examples should be a part of any survival kit for artists, creators, and activists.
FLOSS software, along with providing accessible tools for learning and creating, also embodies and promotes a vital social message: that openness and sharing are far more potent for innovation, creation and empowerment than our current intellectual property system which is based on excessive legal restrictions, limited access, and secrecy.
Biella Coleman