Full text
| |
| Author(s): |
Francisco Antunes Caminati
Total Authors: 1
|
| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas |
| Defense date: | 2013-04-18 |
| Examining board members: |
Pedro Peixoto Ferreira;
Rafael de Almeida Evangelista;
Henrique Zoqui Martins Parra;
Sérgio Amadeu da Silveira;
Islene Calciolari Garcia
|
| Advisor: | Pedro Peixoto Ferreira |
| Abstract | |
This thesis presents the results of a Sociology of Technology research encompassing technological innovation, geopolitical implications and the ecological possibilities of Free Software. The examination explores the operational aspect of ideas and material practices regarding freedom and openness related, respectively, to the concepts of Free Software and Open Source. This effort was made in order to analyze the ambivalent relation between Free Software and the Market, built on a contradictory basis: at first Free Software confronted the Market to defend freedom; but later was able to forge an alliance with the same Market, to build up and expand freedom. The objective is to investigate how far freedom can be expanded within such an alliance and which consequences the expansion of technical and informational environment shared through a Market-controlled freedom might suffer. It is presented the concept of Terra Incognita, as a way of bounding the limits and conflicts arising from conciliating Free Software and freedom restrictive technologies, as well as collaborative communities with appropriation regimes based on spoliation relations. Terra Incognita serves also as way of understanding what lies behind the apparent synergistic convergence between new kinds of freedom, launched by Free Software, and a new kind of appropriation, and practiced by an Open Source Capitalism. A case study on NOKIA's mobilization of a networked community to foster collaborative development of the operational system and several software's for smartphones in the projects Maemo and MeeGo. Besides, through field research in Ecuador; the memoir of the professional participation in public policy implementation in Brazil; and collaborative experience of installing a Free Software audiovisual lab with the Xavante people in the Wederã village (Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Territory, Mato Grosso, Brazil), this thesis analyses the geopolitical implications of the "freedom of not to pay" - meaning that in Free Software distribution not paying is a consequence, not an essential attribute - which allows Third World countries to use Free Software as a means of enabling projects of "Technology Sovereignty". All the results combined point out to the usage of open source as a language to the practice of appropriation without property, also they bespeak the political radicalization of Free Software when its freedom meets reality and social issues sort out in the South American societies. By such an encounter, it is possible to extrapolate the whole meaning of Free Software beyond technology, to a new conception of common environment, comprising information, knowledge and land, hence being itself ecological (AU) | |