Tyranny of Openness in Peer Production

* Article: The Tyranny of Openness: What Happened to Peer Production? Nathan Schneider.

URL = https://osf.io/hnerp/?view_only=44b5c10772d5470892b701dfe4b2c833

Description

"This paper probes a “culture war” underway among software peer-production communities through a review of relevant blog posts,legal documents, forum discussions, and other sources. Software licensing has been a defining strategy for these communities, and much of the conflict at hand revolves around whether licensing should better account for ethics and economics, respectively. Feminist analysis can aid in tracing the contours of discontent through its emphasis on often-overlooked social processes that enable and infuse productive activity. The emerging critiques, and the experiments they have inspired, gesture toward fuller understandings of what “free” and “open” might mean. In the process, peer producers have begun to take seriously certain social and economic questions that they tended to neglect in the past."