The free software community: A contemporary space for reconfiguring struggles?

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, an epistemic community made up of enthusiastic information technology (IT) professionals and amateurs has developed software programmes that anyone can use, study, improve, and redistribute freely. Named the Free/Libre Open Source Software community, this group aims to promote a “sovereign good” throughout the world, embodied by the release of source code. In order to reach this ideal, the community’s activists have developed two grammatical rules: First, a “categorical imperative” (“Do it yourself!”) but also the notion of “common humanity” (based on the mutual dissemination of knowledge). This new critical public space, driven by the ideal of general access to information, produces a form of emancipated labour. By participating in this emancipated labour, unaffiliated individuals have the chance to bind themselves to a social group that, abiding by social norms of its own, bears witness to and participates in technological, industrial, and political change.