This book provides a synoptic perspective on the relationships between free software and freedom. The book focuses on five main themes:

• emancipatory potential of technology
• social liberties
• the facilitation of creativity
• the objectivity of computing as a scientific practice
• the role of software in a cyborg world

and asks: are the freedoms of free software, and how are they manifested? Free software continues to be hyped. This book demonstrates that the hype is well-founded and yet too narrowly focused: free software promises to transform...

Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Software is more than a set of instructions for computers: it enables (and disables) political imperatives and policies. Nowhere is the potential for radical social and political change more apparent than in the practice and movement known as "free software." Free software makes the knowledge and innovation of its creators publicly available. This liberation of code-celebrated in free software's explicatory slogan "Think free speech, not free beer"-is the foundation, for example, of the Linux phenomenon.