free software

As more of daily life moves to the Internet, the political implications of software design become more apparent. A case is point: the Russian government's practice of seizing computers from various citizen advocacy groups because they allegedly contain "pirated" Microsoft software.

Why should the free and open source software community regard their work as a commons? For people focused on building a specific piece of software, the need to label it a "commons" may seem gratuitous. What's the value? But there are some good reasons for understanding free/open source software as a commons, as I explain in a recent essay published by the FLOSS Roadmap project.

We’ve known all along that Facebook was more of a commercial machine committed to corporate advertisers than a benign platform that respects individual users. The problem was, most of our friends and acquaintances are already on Facebook. The site has lots of cool features, and there was no serious alternative to migrate to.