Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software

Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture

by Samir Chopra, Scott Dexter

Software is more than a set of instructions for it enables (and disables) political imperatives and policies. Nowhere is the potential for radical social and political change more apparent than in the practice and movement known as "free software." Free software makes the knowledge and innovation of its creators publicly available. This liberation of code―celebrated in free software’s explicatory slogan "Think free speech, not free beer"―is the foundation, for example, of the Linux phenomenon. Decoding Liberation provides a synoptic perspective on the relationships between free software and freedom. Focusing on five main themes―the emancipatory potential of technology, social liberties, the facilitation of creativity, the objectivity of computing as scientific practice, and the role of software in a cyborg world―the authors What are the freedoms of free software, and how are they manifested? This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how free software promises to transform not only technology but society as well.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Technology

232 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2007

About the author

Samir Chopra is Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He earned a BA in Mathematical Statistics from Delhi University (1984), an MS in Computer Science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (1990) and a PhD in Philosophy from the City University of New York (2000). He has worked on logics for belief revision and merging; his current research interests include pragmatism, Nietzsche, the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence, philosophy of law, the legal theory of artificial agents, and the politics and ethics of technology.

Samir is a blogger at The Pitch, ESPN-Cricinfo, and at http://samirchopra.com. He runs a
Tumblr at http://samirchopra.tumblr.com

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first person who, having released executable code without its source, took it into his head to say "this is mine!" and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of the software industry. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors, and annoying bugs would the human race have been spared, had some one decompiled his source or filled in the gap between proprietary and free software and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of computing belong to all and the earth to no one!”

--J34n-J4cqu3$ R0u$$34u, The Social End-User License Agreement

I've been enamored with the ideals behind Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for most of my life. Though I make some ethical room for proprietary software, I have to acknowledge that the FOSS critiques of ownership, "creation", and property are quite compelling. To that end, Decoding Liberation is a fascinating and in-depth introduction to the ideals and ethical/political/aesthetic critiques unique to the FOSS community. And though it's a philosophical take, Chopra and Dexter aren't afraid to dive into the technical details behind the normative positions (When was the last time you saw a scholarly work cite Slashdot?)

Chopra and Dexter break down their investigation of FOSS into five parts: First, they discuss the implications FOSS has on studies of political economy, including its critiques of so-called "intellectual property". Though that is a common term around works like software and music, the Free Software Foundation and other FOSS-affiliated groups view the term as question begging and refuse to use it. Chopra and Dexter give us a nice summary of the history of computing and the perennial tensions between the hackers, hobbyists, and academics against the beginnings of industry and proprietary software, including young Bill Gates' now infamous open letter to hobbyists. FOSS is seen as a collection of responses to proprietary software, which the authors trace to various Marxist, anarchist, and capitalist critiques still focused on eroding the proprietary software owner's stranglehold over code, as well as the various pragmatic bargains Open Source has with industry, and the prevalent threat of industrial co-optation for software not copylefted.

Second, they turn their attentions to the ethical critiques of FOSS, including user rights to the physical machines they own, whether copyleft is an ethical must or a pragmatic concern, the various ethical views inherent in the multitude of FOSS licenses, and some interesting discussions on positive rights and the blending of utilitarian and deontological ethical critiques among the major players. Finally, there's a quick analogy of license-as-constitution and the creation of a community around shared, and enforced, normative views.

Third, there's a surprisingly fascinating and non-hand-wavey discussion of the aesthetics of code. This was honestly my favorite chapter of the book, both for its treatment of FOSS code as public performance with participation not only expected, but required. Ownership fades away as the community together produces something elegant and functional. Individuals may be praised for noteworthy contributions or hold some exclusive control over the direction of the project, but the unlimited right to fork means that the project, if sufficiently interesting, will not remain static or locked down. The project itself becomes a kind of conversation the community has with itself, reflecting its changing needs, values, and desires. Then again, they also show some of the ugly, hacky, kludgy code that can make its way into FOSS projects. If the book had been written later, the aftermath of Heartbleed would have had Chopra and Dexter diving deep into the horrifying code of OpenSSL. The ability to have the potential for beauty at the same time as actual ugliness in FOSS codebases is an uncomfortable truth.

Fourth, there's a similarly incisive look at FOSS and its interaction with academic computer science. Chopra and Dexter come down pretty hard on academic CS as it exists, describing it as little more than a breeding ground for industry, and a farm for useful and free techniques industry may find useful. But this is almost exclusively a one-way street, as industry jealously guards its improvements and extensions to academic knowledge, restricting the practice of science to a pay-to-play game. The authors also note with some alarm that the industrial convolution with academic computer science is beginning to bleed into other sciences as well.

Finally, the capstone of the book deals with the coming "cyborg" world, as we extend more of ourselves into devices and systems mediated by software. As politics inheres in protocol, it will become more and more necessary to have access to the heretofore mostly secret code. FOSS, and the normative package that comes with it, become vastly more important.

Hackers set out to discover the workings of technical systems but found themselves doing much more. In the cyborg society, investigating a technical system is not idle tinkering: it uncovers the roots of power. A hacker is a public investigator, a gadfly, a muckraker, a public conscience: the guilty hide while the hacker lays bare. Foucault despaired of the immanence of opaque power, but free software creates a moment in which to make the exertion of power transparent. The technical is political: to free software is to free our selves.