Collective action promoted by technological innovations: the case of Brazilian NGOs and the Free Software

Abstract

The technical advances have created disparities related to the field of information technology; some companies are trapped by the knowledge of passwords, licenses and copyrights, prompting the civil society to be held hostage to this process of commercial exploitation and creating a division among the community of technicians on the computer. Arises the Free Software Movement-FSM, for the establishment, use and dissemination of alternative and collaborative software, a new form of collective action that aims to break with the prevailing economic system, using the potential of networks, especially the Internet, because it has its dissemination and spreading across Internet by means of mutual cooperation between professionals engaged in information technology and has achieved several segments of civil society. From these considerations, this paper presents results from a survey of some Non-Governmental Organizations-NGOs in Brazil, about the contributions of FSM for accession, implementation and migration of free software by these NGOs