Re: [jox] Free Software Special Issue
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:03:25 +0200
Hi Maurizio and all!
I'm really not happy with this call.
Last week (9 days ago) Maurizio Teli wrote:
The Critical Power of Free Software: from Intellectual Property to
Epistemologies?
From the perspective of social organization, Free Software can be
conceived as a form of critique by adaptability and modifiability, as
pointed out by anthropologist Christopher Kelty,
I don't like this perspective of Free Software as an anti. Free
Software is peer production and as this it is not anti but trancends
thesis and anti-thesis. IMHO Free Software can not be understood when
viewed as a phenomenon of the ancient regime in spe.
standing outside
institutionalized forms of power
No idea of how this can be said. Of course there are institutionalized
forms of power in Free Software. IMHO this is wishful thinking and a
projection of leftist's visions onto Free Software. It is only useful
to build up a straw man.
and providing working alternatives as
critical tools. Starting from such kind of understanding, Free Software
has been interpreted as a form of critique toward consolidated
capitalistic tropes and contemporary forms, like the extension of
Intellectual Property toward any kind of common pool resources or the
forms of organization of labour and coordination of distributed
developers.
Nevertheless, the increasing adoption of Free Software by multi-national
corporations is now forecasting the domestication of free software
practices by contemporary global capitalism and hierarchical forms of
social organization.
Well, this discussion is now more than 15 years old. Free Software has
its "own" way to cope with this.
It could be intersting to research *this*. In other words: How the
germ form behaves in the `expansion step`_.
.. _expansion step: http://www.oekonux.org/texts/GermFormTheory.html#expansion-step-the-germ-form-becomes-an-important-dimension
Such perspective requires that the critical power of Free Software is
brought under scrutiny,
This the destruction of your straw man argument from above. First you
cast your vision onto Free Software and then you notice that it
doesn't fit. The point is that your vision is wrong in the first
place. IMHO a scientific magazine should refuse such a way of
"arguing".
Frankly I'm really disappointed :-( . The call reflects a leftist
perspective which is unable to recognize Free Software as a peer
production phenomenon. Instead it tries to cast it into leftist
frameworks - just to recognize that Free Software is not what they
cast onto it.
An interesting issue I could imagine could be on false images which
leftists are trying to cast onto Free Software. *That* would be a real
challenge!
Grüße
Stefan