Leveraging Software, Advocating Ideology: Free Software and Open Source

Abstract

This paper uses the software program Linux and the discourse around it in order to examine how software programs can be used to articulate and defend social and economic positions. Although I do not use the term "expression" in a strict legal sense, I claim that in order to make policy decisions involving software, it is important to understand how the functionality of software is expressive. Another way to state this is that software programs like Linux are socially meaningful through functionality and talk about functionality. In section I, I review some recent legal scholarship about software and explain why understanding how embedded technical expression works is important given the increasingly large role of software in governance. In section II, I explore software construction as a combination of social and technical practices. In section III, I describe some examples of meaning-making around the software program Linux. In section IV I conclude with a short description of why such analyses are important.