Technology, Cognition and Culture Lecture Series
Christopher M Kelty
Associate Professor, Center for Society & Genetics
UCLA


Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

Free Software is about more than just software--but what? What is the right way to understand the significance of Free Software and what it has inspired? In this talk I explain why Free Software (a.k.a. open source software) is not just one technology among others, but a crucial example of how people are responding to the changing landscape of power, technology and knowledge creation. In particular I will show how it can be understood as a special kind of "public sphere" central to the cultivation of democratically informed citizens, robust public dialogue, and a new way of understanding the role of technological design in all of this.

Drawing on ethnographic research that have taken me from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, this talk describes the technologies and the moral vision that binds together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. The "cultural significance" of free software extends beyond the narrow case of software, and this talk will touch on some of the ways the practices of free software have been "modulated" in new projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Rice's own Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

The book on which this talk is based is freely available under a Creative Commons License at http://twobits.net