Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software

by Samir Chopra, Scott D. 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.

230 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 25, 2008

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