Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

By Christopher M. Kelty. 2008

718 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a recursive publica public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f69ef0bf200317185e45eddc87c449fa3bc25594

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Citations in the corpus

Data‐Driven Materials Science: Status, Challenges, and Perspectives (2019, background): “This provided a powerful platform and toolset for the collaborative development of software that could then be freely downloaded, culminating in the active open-source movement in 1997.[45] In particular, it suited the kind of focused, rapidly changing software that characterizes nearly all scientif”
Social Media Ethnography: The Digital Researcher in a Messy Web (2012, background): “The social media ethnographer’s ‘archival hubris’ can be compared to that of free software programmers (Kelty, 2008).”
Bots, bespoke, code and the materiality of software platforms (2014, background): “…& Cheshire, 2010), the magnetic storage mechanisms of hard drives (Kirschenbaum, 2008), the copyright licenses of open-source software communities (Kelty, 2008), clerical and support staff in datacenters (Ribes, Jackson, Geiger, Burton, & Finholt, 2013), the role of hackerspaces in China…”
Clarifying Journalism’s Quantitative Turn (2015, background): “Both movements focused on the ability to freely access, modify, and redistribute software as a manifestation of the universal right to access to information and knowledge (Coleman 2013; Kelty 2008).”
Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media (2010, background): “Whether it is a dense ethical practice rooted in legal and technical tinkering online (Coleman 2009, Kelty 2008); the genre-specific attributes of blogs (Doostdar 2004; Herring & Paolillo 2006; Reed 2005, 2008), the status and microcelebrity gained by Webcasting (Senft 2008), or the blurring of…”
Materials and devices of the public: an introduction (2011, background): “More recent work in science studies considers rather the genealogy of ‘technologies of democracy’ modes of technical action, constellations of devices and artefacts or forms of expertise that are constitutive and internal to the production of democratic life itself (Laurent, Lezaun & Marres, 2010; s”
Critical interventions into the corporate smart city (2015, background): “Still others have emphasised challenging the corporate grip on IT through the provision of free software (Kelty, 2008) or politically challenging the status quo by creating loosely associated networks of ‘hacktivists’ and ‘cyber guerrillas’ (like the group Anonymous, amongst others, see Ronson,…”
Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science (2013, background): “‘hack’ that gave birth to the free software movement he opened up a new space for both collective and corporate action (Kelty 2008).”
Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability (2018, background): “…of early virtual communities from counter-culture roots (Turner, 2006), the pursuit of radical transparency by open source programming collectives (Kelty, 2008), and Wikipedia editing communities (Tkacz, 2015), the activism of “hacker” movements premised on enacting libertarian self-realization…”
Wikipedia (2014, background): “In future work, it will be interesting to engage more deeply with contemporary social theory such as the autonomist Marxist tradition (Hardt and Negri 2004; DyerWitheford 1999; Terranova 2004), contemporary theories of info-communism (Kleiner 2010; Söderberg 2007; Moglen 2003, Mueller 2008); to deve”
Turkopticon: interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk (2013, background): “…to mobilize through Facebook, or the Internet hackers Chris Kelty describes as building the infrastructure that make their association possible [26, p.3], our task was to create a means of association people whose common cause was their work on AMT but who lack the technical skills to build…”
Limits and Possibilities for “Ethical AI” in Open Source: A Study of Deepfakes (2022, background): “This centers the developer’s freedom to choose how the product of their labor is used, away from the user’s freedom to use the software for “any purpose”, with the goal of using licenses to foster that “make it easy for the user to do the right thing” [41].”