About the book 'FLOSS and Hegemony'

The full name of the book is 'Hegemony Resistance and Computing: A Study in Postcolonial Political Economy'. It took me almost six years to write this book. It took a quite long time to fix the name. Along these six years, among my friends, both from computing and political economy, we have referred to the book in progress as 'FLOSS and Hegemony'. So, it has become kind of a nickname for the book.

I have discussed it in full length within the book, but let me mention here that, the very strand of thought that gave birth to this book started from a lecture that I delivered to a Refresher Course in Calcutta University for the teachers of Applied Psychology. Here is the lecture:

Tongue to Fingers

But, obviously, the journey that started from this lecture extended by leaps and bounds, and went through many transformations, before it arrived at the book. I tried to understand the FLOSS phenomenon through serious political economy and Hegel's logic. This readily brought this whole thing into a discourse of hegemony and counter-hegemony, through a cross-comparison of this phenomenon with different kinds of politics of resistance, including the Marxist one. I discovered that the whole ability of FLOSS, that it can do what it can, is coming from a tweak very deep down into the category of 'property', and thus in the whole structure of 'market', 'civil society' and 'state' built above it. Till I left Marxist politics in 1989, I was always trying to find, why it all went wrong there. Maybe at last, after these two decades, I started to understand it, in the light of the study on GNU GPL.

This book uses a few concepts developed a decade back in another book 'margin of margin' that you will get there, on the left panel. The concepts are adquately discussed in 'FLOSS and Hegemony' too. But, if someone has a serious interest in postmodern postcolonial political economy, it maybe interesting to study the ways in which the original concepts evolved in line with the changing times, in this elctronic world of networked computers.

Here we are keeping a pre-release version of the book. It has gone to some of my friends for their final suggestions, and as soon as this process is complete, it will be print ready. If after reading this you have something to tell me, please do. The email Id is given on the left panel. For those who will like to read the chapters offline, here they are in a zip file of PDF-s of all the chapters. All these chapters are released under the copyleft licence mentioned here. Anyone can copy or distribute them, without any royalty or anything, but, if this license is attached with those copies, and the copyright of these documents remains with me -- as goes the philosophy of 'copyleft'.

All the PDF files in a zip.

There is a Google Group for this book, where you can discuss anything that comes to your mind in this context, or any question that you come up with while reading this book.

Google Group: FLOSS and Hegemony.

All the chapters, together with Contents and Bibliography are given in the table below to be browsed online.

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