Decoding Liberation
Sander Hicks talks to Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter, the authors of Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software (Routledge, New Media and Cyberculture Series, 2007).
Samir and Scott will be speaking at Vox Pop on Thursday, October 18th at 7 PM.
So, briefly, what is your book Decoding Liberation about?
The 'free' in free software has been famously explained by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation as, "Think free speech, not free beer." In Decoding Liberation, we try to understand the relationship between free software and freedom. We started out by asking, "What is the emancipatory potential of free software and how is it manifested?" and ended up focusing on five main themes: free software's reworking of economic concepts such as property and production, the ethical import of free software for communities and individuals, software and the facilitation of creativity, the objectivity of computing as a scientific practice, and the role of software in a heavily-technologized "cyborg" world.
The term "open source," which is often used almost synonymously with "free software," continues to draw a lot of attention from the business community, largely because there's significant evidence that free/open-source software (FOSS) is often technically superior and cheaper to produce. But in Decoding Liberation, we argue that the truly exciting phenomenon is free software, which promises to transform not only technology and business but society as well. This choice of language is important, because "free software" provokes a discussion about the politics and ethics of technology that "open source" often doesn't.
What was your motivation or goal in undertaking this project?
It seemed to us that for the past ten years or so, free software has been of interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines -- sociology, political science, software engineering, business and economics. Philosophy, though, is notably under-represented in the literature on free software. Many key philosophical concepts (property, aesthetics, autonomy, agency) are already mutating in the digital realm; free software is a particularly interesting arena within which we can examine these changes. One of our goals, then, is to draw philosophers' attention to this area of research -- we regard each of the book's chapters as representing an area rich with opportunities for further philosophical inquiry, though we wrote the book in dialog with a number of other disciplines (like the ones already mentioned).
In your book, you express concern for general access to knowledge, not only in the realm of software. How does this relate to Vox Pop's role as a publishing house?
The issue of publishing is one that is very close to our hearts both as open access advocates and as authors. In the academic publishing context, there is a vibrant movement towards open-access publishing of journals, but progress toward open-access publishing of book-length works is much slower -- for example, we were unable to find a publisher that is both well-regarded in the academic world and willing to publish our book with progressive copyright terms. Vox Pop's micro-publishing helps give authors a voice; the other side of that coin is helping to give access to readers through, say, free copyright terms. It would be useful and interesting to explore what sorts of copyright licenses (such as the Creative Commons variety, or others inspired by the free software ones) could work best for the kind of publishing you do.
Vox Pop is an activist space; what sorts of relevance do you think your book has to activists today?
As we wrote, we began to realize that free software is intricately involved with a number of social goods that are increasingly under attack -- ranging from consumer choice and the struggle against monopolies, to the distribution of creative and intellectual works, to the preservation of the creative and liberatory potential of the Internet, and the human right to communication. We hope our book will make these connections clear, and inspire thought about what sorts of political strategies will work best to preserve these goods. Another of our goals is to make the case to activists from a variety of struggles that tech activism, whether around free software, or privacy, or net neutrality, is an important factor in any fight -- effecting change in the technological sphere has more and more to do with change in the "real world."
Are there other kinds of free-software events we could host at Vox Pop? How could those best be integrated with our activist credo?
For the tech enthusiasts or even just folks that want more choice in their day-to-day computing, Vox Pop could help try to get a GNU/Linux Users Group established in our area and offer space for meetings; it could also host occasional Linux installfests . These sorts of meetings almost inevitably inspire discussion on the attendant politics of free software. Vox Pop could also host meetings by groups like the New York Ubuntu Group, a free software support group for the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution. More generally, Vox Pop could seek out speakers on current topics in the politics of technology (e.g. the fight to keep the internet free and open, or Verizon's refusal to carry NARAL messages on its cellular network). |
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