Re: [ox-en] Free Software and social movements in South America
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 09:53:10 +0200
Hi Rafael and all!
Last month (38 days ago) Rafael Evangelista wrote:
I'm from hipatia too. I'm on this list because Juan Carlos told me about
Oekonux.
You are welcome :-) .
I'm a researcher from Brazil (Unicamp, State University of Campinas) and
my master dissertation, on linguistics (discourse analisys), was about
the free software movement and politics.
Is it available online?
From a conception that
considers that the language event is a political event, it was looked to
understand as and where the political enrolls itself in this debate. On
the third chapter of the dissertation I've examined some of the possible
reasons why the free software movement on Latin America most of times
use the expression "free software" and almost never "open source", and
which characteristics and qualities the Latin American movement
enphasize about FOSS (i.e., independence from foreing) countries.
This is, however, a point which also (state) government emphasize. And
BTW this is not different in the EU where the EU suggests to use Free
Software also to become independent from US monopolies (and to
strengthen European industry - which is probably also a point in South
America.)
In which way is this point important for a social movement beyond the
point of the option of autonomous action? I guess a social movement
would suffer from a local monopoly equally like from a remote
monopoly.
I think one of the best examples of political activity of Latin American
movement is this: http://www.grain.org/i/?id=38 But there is some
resistance about this kind of action from the non-political part of the
movement
This is the point that Free Knowledge / patents is a general topic
becoming more and more important. Medicine is another example here.
Now I'm a PHD student on anthropology and my research theme will be (I'm
on my first year) the history of formation of the brazilian free
software movement.
Very interesting :-) .
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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