Co-operative practices and the ethics of sharing at the crossroads of two social worlds: advocates of free software and community groups in Quebec

Abstract

The authors suggest elements for a definition of the culture of free software. They go on to look at the points where two social worlds intersect: the world of advocates of free software and activists in the co-operative movement in Quebec. They analyse points of divergence and convergence between the former's innovative practices in the technological field and the latter 's innovative practices in the social field. They put forward the hypothesis that these cross-fertilizations of practices produce new models of social and technological innovation which come close to what some social scientists call ascendant innovation processes.