Last Thursday evening I made my second trek of the day out to the west side of Manhattan and sat in on an awesome talk that was part of the Upgrade! NY series focused on activism and creative practice. It was a discussion called Free as in what? A debate on open source vs. free culture and featured Gabriella Coleman and Zack Lieberman as anthropologist/activist and artist, respectively.
I had heard of Coleman because she’s writing the forthcoming article on digital anthropology for the Annual Review. I was expecting a discussion which would have Coleman playing the part of academic and heavily covering the theory territory, while Leiberman would provide the ‘on the ground’ perspective of the day to day interaction with open source. The talk did have these aspects, but I was pleasantly surprised that the dichotomy between the two roles was minimised. Leiberman did cover his first hand experience, relaying some entertaining and instructive stories about free/open source conferences he had attended and also his experience with licensing his own work. But Coleman frequently referenced her own on the ground fieldwork experiences – with hackers and other coders – to bring their voices and points of view into the discussion. Yay! I’ve left so many talks and conferences where the anthropologist never mentions their fieldwork that produced the data or experience that they’re talking about (I don’t know why this is – was it really that bad of an experience, or does everyone just assume that it doesn’t need to be mentioned?)It’s always seemed weird to me. In any case, it was a relief to see someone talk about their fieldwork research as if they actually enjoyed it and found it productive, and mentioned it in a way that recognised it as producing crucial data.
Coleman opened the discussion outlining the changing definitions of freedom that have occurred throughout the evolution of the free/open source software movement (FLOSS). And Leiberman closed the pre-Q&A session by sharing his hopes that the part of open source which focuses on creating and sharing will remain a strong ethos in spite of the tedium of licensing.
Key and interesting points:
- tracing the idea of ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ in FLOSS from the idividual to an institution, then being grounded in social practice and finally being seen in a set of politics or political ideals
- “narrow moral politics” often present in FLOSS as opposed to those in activist groups such as Rise Up which utilise free/open source software
- participation in open source projects give rise to/brings about awareness of a moral order
- associations between free code and free speech
- difference between web 2.0 and FLOSS – there should be a distinction between FLOSS web 2.0 technology and proprietary web 2.0 technology. there is an inherent imbalance of power between owner and participants that runs contra to FLOSS ethos in much of web 2.o tech – no data portability – your labour and data goes into a platform, but you can’t easily get it out – there is also the possibility that you loose access to it altogether
Things to follow up:
- story of Microsoft trying to tag FLOSS as socialistic in en effort to bring about its downfall
- the differences between all the licenses – BSD, GPL, CC – I thought I had a general grasp on them; it turns out I don’t
- the difference between free software (social movement?) and open source (development technology?)
And if you happen to be in NYC on 9 Nov there is a talk on the relationship between art & activism: Tactical Art for Social Shaking. I’m loving spending time in this city!
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