Free Software as a Social Movement

Hanspeter Kriesi gives the following definition of a social movement: “By a social movement, we often mean a group of people involved in a conflict with clearly identified opponents, sharing a common identity, a unifying belief or common program, and acting collectively”.
In the case of the Free Software Movement, the group of people involved are the users and programmers of free/open source software, the so called “geeks”, people who love and help develop the concept of software freedom, but also normal people who prefer an open society to a closed, private society. This is the so called recursive public. The recursive public is “a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public.
Geeks find affinity with one another because they share an abiding moral imagination of the technical infrastructure, the Internet, that has allowed them to develop and maintain this affinity in the first place.” We haven’t spoken about the Internet so far, but it is the main ground for collective action of the Free Software Movement and its members.
Newsletters, discussions, projects, campaigns are all started and take place on on-line platforms. Most members of the FSM don’t even know each other personally, and probably communicate on a regular basis with people who they only know by their nickname. This sort of communication is labeled as computer mediated. Most if not almost all communication between members of the FSM, even political activism campaigns, is carried out through computer mediated communication (CMC), making it much different than classical social movements, with rallies, sit-ins, demonstrations, and other typical forms of demonstrative collective action. CMC also allows for rapid, accurate and cheap communication.
Probably the most important aspect of the FSM, due in part to the power and range of CMC, is that it has a cross-gender, cross-class, intergenerational, international, multi-language, multi-racial, pluri-religious, pluri-political public. Under this aspect it is a universal movement of sorts. Much different than the social movements of the 50‘s and 60’s: the feminist movement, the civil rights movements and others, which have a particularistic public. The FSM isn’t limited to “a specific physical or cultural space”, to national or cultural boundaries. When asked if he felt like a social rights movement leader, Stallman answered: “I'm not in his [Martin Luther King] league, but I do play the same game […] it's a universal message. It's a message of firm condemnation of certain practices that mistreat others. It's not a message of hatred for anyone. And it's not aimed at a narrow group of people. I invite anyone to value freedom and to have freedom.” This is the common identity, the unifying belief and the common program: freedom. The freedom evoked by the Free Software Definition, to use, to adapt, to share, to help, to improve for everyone and for the common good.