Yuri Takhteyev's Coding Places is an ethnographic study of software development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As such, it offers a welcome and necessary counterpoint to Gabriella Coleman's Coding Freedom, which examines the culture of free software and open source hackers, primarily in the United States. Coleman's work is an excel. lent look into the moral world of free software and the pleasures of coding that motivate it. While free software is a critique of the dominant intellectual property regime of the West, it itself stems from and reinterprets a liberal ethics, one which focuses on free speech and individual creative expression.
Coleman's book focuses on the ethical and affective dimensions of being a "hacker," a programmer devoted to producing "free software." On the ethical side, by "free, *" hackers mean "free as in speech," not merely free of monetary cost, "as in [free] beer.' " In chapter 5, Coleman describes the emergence of a free software politics, in which code is seen not as technological artifact (and thus property) but as speech, protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. In chapter 2, Coleman recounts the historical emergence of the free software movement in response to the gradual enclosure of software under a legal intellectual property regime. The hacker Richard Stallman created the GNU Public License (GPL), which used copyright to force users to freely share software that used code licensed under the GPL, cleverly subverting intellectual property through its own mechanisms. The conclusion examines how the political success of free software depends upon a disavowal of traditional political divisions into "liberal" and "conservative." This agnosticism allows open source to be used both by corporations such as IBM and by leftist activist groups.
