O Culture's Open Sources: Software, Copyright, and Cultural Critique

gramming and distribution which, when combined with novel uses of intellectual property law, has come to be known as “free software” or “open source software.” It is distinguished from other forms and practices of software production for many reasons, but most interestingly because its practitioners discuss it not simply in technical terms, but as a philosophy, a politics, a critique, a social movement, a revolution, or even a “way of life.” For practitioners, observers, and advocates who have been drawn into this net of zeitgeisty claims, it seems to offer an answer to the 21st century question of how we should live—or at least, how we should promise, share, code, hack, license, lawyer, organize, buy, sell, own, sing, play, or write. More recently, such talk has broken free of its connection to software and become common amongst artists, writers, scientists, NGOs, and activists. It has provided them with not only a new rhetoric, but a new set of practices concerning authorship, ownership, expression, speech, law, politics, and technology. These papers are short pieces that represent new anthropological research on these phenomena in widely disparate social spaces and global locations.1 They are meant to provoke anthropologists (even those who might be utterly SOCIAL THOUGHT AND COMMENTARY