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This book explores software's pivotal role as the code that powers computers, mobile devices, the Internet, and social media. Creating conditions for the ongoing development and use of software, including the Internet as a communications infrastructure, is one of the most compelling issues of our time. Free software is based upon open source code, developed in peer communities as well as corporate settings, challenging the dominance of proprietary software firms and promoting the digital commons. Drawing upon key cases and interviews with free software proponents based in Europe, Brazil and the U.S., the book explores pathways toward creating the digital commons and examines contemporary political struggles over free software, privacy and civil liberties on the Internet that are vital for the commons' continued development.
List of contents
1. Hiding in Plain Sight: Software, Surveillance and Capitalism in Everyday Life
2. Coding the Digital Commons: Foundations in Free Software and the Emerging Internet
3. From Markets to Commons: Free Software as Catalyst for Change
4. Forking Toward the Commons: Sustaining Freedom through Organizational Change
5. Software Politics: Building Communities to Defend Software Freedom
6. Internet Politics: Organizing for Net Neutrality and Civil Liberties
7. Global Communities of Resistance and the Digital Commons
About the author
Sara Schoonmaker is Professor of Sociology at the University of Redlands, USA.
Summary
This book explores software's pivotal role as the code that powers computers, mobile devices, the Internet, and social media.
