ABSTRACT
Free software (FS) offers a cogent entry into struggles over meanings of sharing that, in turn, are key to contentions about the appropriate legal, economic and technical frameworks for digital media. By creating sophisticated media platforms and an unconventional but robust legal regime of circulation, FS activists recast media change in terms of choices, which are often tied to political and social conjunctures. Ethnographic accounts of the expansive sociality of FS also suggest another way of thinking about the universality of free software: anyone is invited to contribute. Aiming to broaden the range of people interested in free software, FS advocates emphasized a sense of social purpose in contrast to imagery of geeks as asocial technophiles or gadget consumers. In-line skating was a major socializing activity among Parisian software activists at the time, so an in-line-skating penguin is a mascot of the Parisian software association Parinux.
