Reykjavík.
We move on at ECPR 2011 to Andrea Calderaro, who zooms in on the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement as a form of political struggle in the network society. It is important here to move beyond digital media as a mere tool, but to question the code itself; FOSS does this by open-sourcing code to allow greater interaction and transparency.
Closed code creates new forms of power inequality, and restrictions of access and participation are imposed through legislation which is supported and requested by software companies; this creates and maintains new elites. By contrast, FOSS delivers four freedoms: to run the software; to study how it works; to redistribute it; and to improve it and share those improvements.
Such FOSS tools have been used to support electoral campaigns, facilitate local government, and support the organisation of social movement events, for example – pointing to some of the underlying politics of open source. From that perspective, FOSS is politics, pursuing freedom of expression (through the code) and a democratising of technology (through using the software).
This demonstrates how new media struggles arise around control over the construction of digital media, Andrea suggests.
