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important to underline the difference between free software and open source. As the Free Software Foundation says: ‘Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users’ freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better” – in a practical sense only.’146 In other words, the awareness of the collective of itself as a collective, one that has chosen and negotiated its values and its principles, is a characteristic of free software and not necessarily of open source. On the contrary, the open source notion can be used – and is used – to feed the logic of digital labor, which involves exploiting individuals’ work to increase corporate profit.147 ••It is owned by a collective. The work on licenses has been one of the more important developments of the free software community. Free software is developed under the GNU General Public License.148 The main principles of this license are intended to make it impossible to create private ownership. Free software is always in the public domain. ••It is accessible to a collective. Accessibility is one of the pillars of the free software movement because its existence is based on it. In order to be developed, free software must be accessible. Everything is thus accessible: the source code and its versions, the discussions about the development, the documentations. The free software approach enables the creation of a digital public space and makes a critical view on it possible because it allows us to understand the principles and reasons behind its structures.
Open Access If accessibility and collective ownership are two necessary conditions for a space to be public, it is important to give some consideration to the philosophy of open access. The analysis of editorialization that we proposed earlier suggests that we should treat all forms of the production of public space as a whole: software and technology production should not be separated from knowledge production because both are part of a unique dynamic. Open access of scientific knowledge is crucial: such knowledge was typically a part of the public sphere as defined by Habermas. The privatization of this knowledge in digital space is one of the main problems to be solved if we want to avoid the risks underlined by the pessimistic argument. Open access has many implications, including issues of copyright politics and notions of fair use,149 economic and institutional issues,150 as well as more broad philosophical and political issues. I will focus here on the philosophical and political implications of open access.
See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html. Evgeny Morozov, ‘The Meme Hustler’, The Baffler, April 2103, http://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html. See for example, Michael Geist (ed.) The Copyright Pentalogy: How the Supreme Court of Canada Shook the Foundations of Canadian Copyright Law, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2013. 150 See for example, Peter Suber, Open Access, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012, and ‘Good Practices for University Open Access Policies – Harvard Open Access Project’, 2016, http://cyber.law. harvard.edu/hoap/Good_practices_for_university_open-access_policies. 146 147 148 149