2. From Free Software to Open Source

The chapter explores the values and ethics of Free Software to what is now often called, ‘open source,’ beginning with its negotiations of knowledge and power with Silicon Valley behemoths that are all built on foundations of Linux servers and open source software. It follows the evolving nomenclature and semantic shifts of FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software), where the ‘L’ represents freedom (libre) as in speech, to the ‘political agnosticism” (Coleman 2004) of FOSS or F/OSS and how open source (OSS) has been offered as a business model for (corporate) infrastructure (Birkinbine 2020). Semi-structured interviews as ‘epistemological encounters’ (Kelty 2008) with ‘informants’ (software developers, academics and ‘geeks’) provide empirical data. Structured by the dimensions or properties of Star (1999) and Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) emerging infrastructures, a critical discourse analysis interweaves excerpts from the interviews to integrate the informants’ ethics and values and connect them with existing infrastructure theory. The findings show that the makers/practitioners of today (the informants), who, as a recursive public (Kelty 2008), consider FOSS/open source an open (knowledge) infrastructure yet these terminologies differ more on an ethical than a technical level. For some, openness, politics and a commons is necessary to build techno-infrastructures The chapter puts forth different values and ambiguities that characterize the plurality of political and ethical views and contributes by demonstrating how and when FOSS can be deemed an open (knowledge) infrastructure.