Research on (re)search: FLOSS as an open knowledge infrastructure

This talk delves into the values and ethics of Free Software, traversing its negotiations of knowledge and power by Silicon Valley behemoths that are all built on foundations of Linux servers and open source software. It follows the evolving nomenclature of F(L)OSS to open source, which has been offered as a business model for (corporate) infrastructure; simultaneously it recounts how software developers worldwide built new infrastructures and technical solutions based on shared resources and open code. Yet was Free Software a dispositif (Foucault), an ideology (Stallman), a strategy, as with open source (Raymond), or an “open knowledge infrastructure” that is not understood enough? To grasp this interplay between these technical infrastructures as artefacts and human organisation, as well as the ethics and politics implicit within their design, speaking directly with those immanent is essential.

Semi-structured interviews with developers, academics, geeks and awardees from NGI (Next Generation Internet) Search projects, which have to be made open source upon completion, put forth the value openness in relation to other core ethics: useability, modifiability and maintenance. A critical discourse analysis interweaves excerpts from the interviews structured by Star and Ruhleder’s dimensions (1996), or Star’s properties (1999), of an emerging infrastructure. The Free Software movement of past decades resurfaces through the makers/practitioners of today, who, as a recursive public (Kelty 2008), elucidate the techno-infrastructural through the medium itself (code). These interventions go beyond the critique of open source as a solution to proprietary software and copyleft ideology to show how they differ more on an ethical, than a technical, level. Drawing on a chapter for the forthcoming book Politics of Open Infrastructures, this presentation demonstrates how F(L)OSS can be deemed an open (knowledge) infrastructure through its reorientation of knowledge and power, whilst revealing some of the values and ethical considerations embedded within developing open source (search) projects.