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"Given that he is still alive and has a thriving career based on exerting hegemonic control over F/OSS discours" My reading of the above is that Stallman is ex

• ewzimm 13y ago
  If Stallman were able to exert hegemonic control, we would not be using words like FOSS, and software development would focus on solving social problems. Stallman is vocal about his Socialism and spends most of his time addressing political issues. Anyone can see this clearly on stallman.org. But since the free software model was so successful, many people worked hard to remove its political associations, creating the open source movement. I think the real hegemony is the collection of existing power structures, which will always work to assimilate successful models. It's important to think about who benefits in social interactions, but a useful analysis requires understanding particular historical details like the animosity between idealists and pragmatists in the FLOSS community. It might have been more useful to state that despite its idealiatic origins and the continued participation of people who want to address social problems with software, old structures of privilege continue to determine who benefits from social interactions. Anyone who disagrees with these privileges must take care to decide how best to work against them, because the default benefit is always to those who have inherited privileges.