Strategy of Good Software Governance: FLOSS in the State of Turkey

Introduction

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”; as B. Fuller (1895-1983), believed that in the system of monetary capitalism, it is practically meaningless to fight forces. So, smashing burgeoning technology for putting them out of their particular works is no longer the case of matter in the era of singularity. Nevertheless, this is not meant that the public ought not to have a particular criticism to technological singularity; or at least, no particular ethical concerns about its possible prospective and retrospective memory in the global (capitalist) system. The burgeoning technology is peculiar and mostly irregular, as W. Mossberg states that “why shouldn’t a PC work like a refrigerator or a toaster?” Or “I'm an enemy of what I call 'computer theology.' There's a class conflict out there. There's a techno-elite that lives in a different world”. These quotations are what makes us concerned about cybernetics which is the school of ‘meaning to lead’, and particularly associated with the idea of dominations and controls, characteristically regarding criticism against doctrine of technological totalitarianism, existing mechanisms (machines and humans and their commissure), in which known and/or unknown one group control another. So, cybernetic is for the purpose of revealing its orchestrating mechanisms. “It is no longer a question of predicting the future, but of reproducing the present. It is no longer a question of static order, but of a dynamic self-organization” (Tiqqun, 2010, p.18). In this sense, cybernetics refers to an emergent governance of technology, policy and management, in which each element has actual persistence(s) of reality, but when they are merged together, multiplicities of reasonably complex interactions are arisen.

To study concerns of emerging cybernetics, interestingly enough, present software is escalating in order to sell hardware - e.g. present technology has no responsive meaning at all without software applications, such as Operating Systems (OSs) or the Internet. This makes software an interesting but sophisticated phenomenon. It is thereby initially essential to anatomize sociology of software cybernetics into two broad movements: Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Proprietary Close Source Software (PCSS), to argue how our new technological revolution (e.g. innovations) exposures new concerns of our good governance approach in the capitalist democratic systems. This chapter broadly highlights why not to put technological movements into the same vein at all, because some of burgeoning technology should benefits public as a whole, in the prime imaginable way, as FLOSS movements seek. Then, this chapter compares the sociology of PCSS with those of FLOSS, highlighting their consequences as hegemonic totalitarianism with PCSS versus flexible emancipation with FLOSS. As the “control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress” (Grand, 2003). So, it is actually essential to have the core knowledge of sociological of education and technology, in particular neither Utopian nor Luddite approach of Technorealism to conceptualise our new social goods, because