The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its weekly lunch seminar:

CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 28 November 2007
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin119

Topic: Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

Speaker: Christopher M. Kelty, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and a Visiting Professor at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard.

Abstract:

Christopher M. Kelty will discuss his research on the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software, but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty shows how these specific practices have
reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge after the arrival of the Internet. This work also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”–a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place..

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