Floss and the Practices of Freedom
My research is focused on what I call the "practices of freedom". With
this term I refer to the set of practices and activities, between the
ones characterizing Free/Libre
and Open Source
Software (FLOSS) development, that participates at the construction of
freedom in software production.At the core of this analysis lies the relationship between artifacts production and politics, following the Latour's "which politics for which artifacts?" question. In this sense, the aim of the research is to trace which are the practices enacted by the participants to a FLOSS community and how do they connect with the construction of the political meaning of freedom.
This has a double face potential outcome: on one side, thanks to the point-of-view of the ethnographer, to give a different account of FLOSS production and, in the long term, to make clear which are the political elements involved in software development; on the other side, to contribute to the academic research about FLOSS and practices, stressing the political meaning of everyday activities.
As an ethnographer, or a cyberethnographer as I like to be called, I'm facing the methodological and epistemological issues related to the study of groups which are mainly web-based. At the same time, I was forced by my methodological choice of ethnography, to find a "field", a group which is the starting point of my research. From this point of view, I've been lucky in being accepted by the OpenSolaris Community.
These community has been built after the choice of Sun Microsystems to release part of the code of its Solaris Operating System under a FLOSS license. The involvement of a well-known corporation in the FLOSS world opens up new questions in relation to the "practices of freedom": how does the pursuing of FLOSS as a business strategy participate to the construction of freedom?how do the old and consolidated corporation practices relate to the new practices connected with the involvement of a wider audience? These are the questions I'm trying to answer.
Important notice: Solaris and OpenSolaris are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.