The world is one and common to those who are awake, but that everybody who is asleep turns away to his own. Heraclitus (2006, Fragment 89)

This book critically engages with the activities and theoretical exchanges between the free/libre and open source software groups who write and share computer code online. I place these groups in the context of the expansion of intellectual property rights and look at their discourses surrounding the enclosure of the
‘intellectual’ commons. In particular, I explore how free/libre software and open source software (FLOSS) articulates productive forms of self-knowledge and discipline (such as through discursive formations and code), which appear to establish a potential for uncoordinated and decentred models of creativity. In doing so, I investigate how code designates what is prescribed and what is not, what is articulated and what is silenced; how code structures our lives and our subjectivity. I hope to uncover the way in which
the open source and free software groups are challenging our existing liberal categories (around cultural production, knowledge ownership and authorship) both in economic terms (that is, as a new form of commons-based peer production) and in terms of political liberties (for example, the question of free speech, democracy and its connection to code).

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