FLOSS

FLOSS in practice Beyond operating systems such as Linux, the FLOSS movements have produced even more popular applications such as the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client, which run on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux machines. The contemporary office suite LibreOffice extensively duplicates the functionalities of Microsoft’s Office software – and again runs on all three operating systems. Such software is hence attractive not only to young people and university students with limited finances; it is further argued to be critical to overcoming the “digital divide” and to exploiting digital media for the sake of development – while also preserving cultural diversity contra the dominance of Western, especially US-based, corporations (www.libreoffice.org/about-us/who-are-we). Strikingly, LibreOffice is used by governmental agencies in Latin-speaking countries – as well as in Taiwan.

But the ethical sensibilities and applications of FLOSS are not limited to computer applications: they have generated other fruitful – perhaps even essential – kinds of sharing online. The obvious example is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Wikipedia invites more or less anyone to not simply read, but also actively write for and contribute other forms of media to, a given webpage. The motto “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge” (https://wikimediafoundation.org) is clearly in the spirit of FLOSS – and has resulted since its founding in 2001 in a remarkable resource: by 2015, the website hosted “more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages”.