Free Information and Software In Contemporary Capitalism

Abstract

The contemporary society increasingly presents the necessity of the individuals to have control of the selection, processing, communication and the use of information. The computerization of the society is increasing and well-known, mediated mainly by the new technologies capable to establish links in different and distant geographic spaces, converging with a great amount of information in the most diverse areas of human intelligence, either for the cultural, enterprise, political and governmental use, or even for entertainment. Because of the technological transformations occurred since the effective implementation of the Internet, new forms of organization and production of software appeared, highlighting nowadays, the movement of free software and the current speeches telling us that it would establish itself with a liberating character for sharing information and knowledge. This study verifies the trends and the routes of free software in the contemporary capitalism, carrying out a discussion between the existing speeches supported by Information Science, and the discussion of the political economy of information.