The Tyranny of openness: what happened to peer production?

ABSTRACT

This paper examines a “culture war” underway among software peer-production communities through relevant blog posts, legal documents, forum discussions, and other sources. Software licensing has been a defining strategy for peer producers, and much of the conflict at hand revolves around whether licensing should more fully incorporate ethics and economics, respectively. Feminist analysis can aid in tracing the contours of discontent through its emphasis on social processes that enable and infuse productive activity—processes that peer producers have trained themselves to ignore. The emerging critiques, and the experiments they have inspired, gesture toward fuller understandings of what “free” and “open” might mean.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist theory
• peer production
• commons
• free software
• open source
• software licensing
• intellectual property

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for feedback on earlier drafts from Michel Bauwens, Heather Meeker, Matthew S. Wilson, and extraordinary anonymous reviewers.

Disclosures

While working on this article, I was invited to join the Ethical Source Working Group and did so.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a fellowship from the Open Society Foundations, grant number IN2019-52107, which is not responsible for the content.

Notes on contributors

Nathan Schneider

Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. His most recent book is Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy. E-mail: [email protected].