Free software

Free software or copyleft software is software that isn't proprietary. It may be used, shared and adapted freely under the condition that it retains its free status. Often such software is created according to peer-to-peer development model.

As a revolutionary project

From a Marxist perspective, the free software movement is a political struggle against the capitalist enclosure of intellectual commons. To some degree, it is an organised effort to create a social alternative to the prevailing private order.

However, this fact is rarely acknowledged by participants in the free software community, and therefore it cannot be regarded as a full political movement. It isn't conscious of the political nature of its struggle. Free software developers come from a variety of political and apolitical backgrounds, and thus the movement tends to be wary of discussing political implications along traditional ideological lines. Instead it maintains its own internal ideological discourse devoid of a broader understanding of the economy.

As a capitalist institution

Software is material

It is easy to idealise free software as free of centralised control and therefore socialist, but this ignores a number of important factors.

Although in principle anyone can copy it, free software may still have a canonical distributor that decides upon official editions. These are then the editions that everyone uses, and to go off and use another edition isolates a user from the added value this network of fellow users and developers offers. In this way, free software can still be considered proprietary software, and be used to extract a profit.

Likewise, consider the end users applying the software. While in principle anyone can use the software for whatever ends, only established institutions are able to apply them in a socio-economically significant way. Changing this reality requires a rearrangement of productive relations outside of the scope of the free software movement.

Difficulty with consumer products

Since participants in the free software movement tend to be computer experts, the software they produce tends to be unfit for widespread use by consumers. Corporations, whose continued existence relies on being able to market their software, are much more effective at providing an accessible product. Likewise they will have more resources to push their product onto the market, and will therefore be able to amass a user base much more quickly.

As a socialist institution

[How socialism would benefit from free software]

External links

Online leftist analyses of free software:

• "Reclaiming the Computing Commons" by Rob Hunter in Jacobin Magazine
• "Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist Critique" by Johan Söderberg in the First Monday journal
• "The problem with the computer industry under capitalism - Free Software the answer?" by Maarten Vanheuverswyn on Marxists.com
• "Badiou’s ethics and the Free Software Revolution" by Katarina Peovic Vukovic in the Badieu Studies journal
• "Communism and Computer Ethics: Public Goods and Intellectual Property Rights", CS project at Stanford University
• "Free Software and Market Relations" by Raoul Victor (translated debate)