Categories
Free Culture Satire

Coals To Newcastle

Having read Marx, Lacan, Deleuze, Negri, Zizek, and possibly having nipped back for a bit of supplementary Spinoza, you might think you are ready to tell Free Software what it has got wrong and how it can be made better. Not so fast! There are just two more things you need to read.

The first is Richard Stallman’s essay “Why Software Should Not Have Owners“. Even just the title will do.

The second is Stallman’s personal website. Especially the political notes.

These sources show that free software contains as part of its ideology a definite if limited answer to the property question and that this limit neither precludes nor can be coherently extended to encompass (rather than exist as part of) a broader progressive political commitment.

Innit.