Christopher Kelty in his book 2bits, claims that Free Software is an expression of culture in the sense that culture, as well as Free Software is an ongoing ever changing process. What differs culture and Free Software is that the latter threaten and presupposes a reorientation of power and knowledge as we know it and that availability modificability and reusability are the main ingredient in this process of reorientation. Neither the Free Software or the platform that the internet constitutes are stable and unchanging concepts, therefore they are two concepts that are in process of reorientation 24/7. The culture of Free Software builds on the past and reconfigures its features in an eternal process of modification. ‘modificability is a way of making flexible, modifiable infrastructures like the internet as safe as permanent, inflexible ones like roads and bridges’ (Kelty 2008:12). The public sphere of Free Software has its basis in the social imagination of its creators, re-inventors and users.
On this note I would like to stress the parallel to the concept of Free Software and the concept of culture. Both have a shared meaning, ethics and moral as its core. And culture is always related to history, the past is in the present and culture is also being reinvented and has a changing character with the shared concepts of meaning at its core. The same can be said about Free Software. Availability, reusability and modifiability are at the heart of the reorientation that makes Free Software so radical.
