The road to freedom: Free and open-source software

The book The Road to Freedom by Matej Mertik is not only informative and interesting, but also inspiring. It shows that the open-source software revolution is based on an ambitious philosophical, ethical and political vision of a better society, based on the definition of freedom, progress, free creativity, accessibility and global cooperation as fundamental values from the very beginning of the digital age.

Gorazd Andrejč, PhD, Philosopher, Groningen University, Science and research centre (ZRS) Koper

The book on open-source software explains to the reader one of the important reasons why modern information technology is so successful. The invention of the computer and further development based on it, which led to the Internet, the World Wide Web and artificial intelligence, is certainly one of the most important human development achievements, at the level of the invention of writing and printing.

Professor Franc Solina, PhD, professor of computer science, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (Organization Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire), known as CERN, consists of more than 600 institutes and universities from more than 110 countries around the world, where today thousands of scientists use CERN's research capabilities. The most famous is certainly its research device Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is the most complex laboratory device ever built and the largest gargantuan research machine in the world, built and developed by thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians over decades and which is still being further developed into a machine operating at the limits of scientific knowledge.

The cultural power of the big media, which dictates what we can and cannot do with the culture around us, is in complete conflict with values ​​such as freedom of speech and the free market, which are defended by the society. Lessig wonders why this is happening and why we actually allow such control by the big media and corporations. By doing so, it shows us that we need to lose a long tradition of cultural freedom, which means losing the freedom to create, the freedom to design, and ultimately the freedom about our own performance.