Not Just Software: Free Software and the (Techno) Political Action

The practice of developing and creating Free Software has been the centre of attention for studies related to economics, knowledge production, laws and the intellectual property framework. However, the practice that constitutes the initiative of Free Software also means a call to rethink current forms of political action and the in-depth meaning of what is understood as “political†. This constitutes the field which has been called techno-activism. Along these lines, the authors propose a particular reading of the political challenge that is Free Software from the standpoint of Hardt and Negri’s (2000) theoretical work. The authors put forward various contributions -regarding the organization, the agents and the form of political action- that they consider to pose a crisis for traditional proposals and urge society to renew its way of relating to information, the raw material upon which the current exercise of government and practices of techno-activist resistance rest.