In "Two Bits", Christopher M. Kelty investigates
the history and cultural significance of Free Software,
revealing the people and practices that have transformed
not only software, but also music, film, science, and
education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted
to the collaborative creation of software source code
that is made openly and freely available through an
unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty shows how
these specific practices have reoriented the relations
of power around the creation, dissemination, and
authorization of all kinds of knowledge after the
arrival of the Internet. "Two Bits" also makes an
important contribution to discussions of public spheres
and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free
Software is a "recursive public" - a public organized
around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the
very infrastructure that gives it life in the first
place. Drawing on ethnographic research that took him
from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston
to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in
Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the
moral vision that binds together hackers, geeks,
lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each
case, he shows how their practices and way of life
include not only the sharing of software source code but
also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright
licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing
for the movement. By exploring in detail how these
practices came together as the Free Software movement
from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also shows how it is
possible to understand the new movements that are
emerging out of Free Software: projects such as Creative
Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright
licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online
scholarly textbook commons.
|
|