FLOSS Redux: Notes on African Software Politics

With a host of corporations, foundations and organizations active in the fields of advocacy and assistance, free and open source software (FLOSS) has become a dynamic area of info-developmental cooperation. In the eminently pragmatic approach adopted by many of these efforts, the intense controversy over free vs. open source software and the extent to which advocacy should stress freedom over commercial applicability somehow seems a thing of the past. At the same time, the focus on FLOSS as an economic strategy of autonomous development within global network capitalism, rather than as a post-capitalist practice of collaborative creation, recalls some of the general ambivalences at the heart of software-political struggles.

Online version here.