- Sep 2017
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Local file Local file
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Maker culture has been criticized for simply being a de-politicized version of hacker culture, naively unable to reconcile its own promises of a revolution (Morozov, 2014). While maker culture's connection with socio-economic change and hacker culture at larger is debatable, it seems more certain it comes with an attendant set of nested practices and attitudes. Lindtner and Li (2012) describe maker culture as ''technological and social practices of creative play, peer production, a commitment to open source principles, and a curiosity about the inner workings of technology" (p. 18). Chris Anderson (2012) claims that the maker movement has three characteristics: the use of digital tools for creating products, cultural norms of collaboration, and design file standards (p. 21 ). Hughes (2012) notes maker culture's emphasis on being open-source and posited that it ''ties together physical manufacturing skills with the higher end technical skills of hardware construction and software programming" (p. 3884).
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- Jan 2017
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medium.com medium.com
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Interesting to see what some people think ‘open source’ is these days. Back when the OSI was created with the movement that wanted to call it ‘open source’ instead of ‘free software’, people said ‘don’t do that — it devalues the fundamental point’. And here we are 20 years later, with OSS being hugely well-used, but many of the contributors insisting that licences are irrelevant or just having available source is all that’s needed, or it’s all about the community. Well I guess those of us who though that the ‘Open Source’ naming was a bad plan are proved right about the downside. But of course we’ll never know if it would have been so successful if it had remained as ‘Free Software’ (I don’t see why not, because it’s the process and efficiency that has made it popular).
This note is aligned with most of my comments on the open source depolitization of free software.
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medium.com medium.com
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Early open source was about the idea that code is ownerless, enforceable by license, which theoretically leads to resilient software.Modern open source is about 1) building and 2) collaborating in public.The conversation has shifted from protecting the rights of a user to adopt the software as they wish (now the norm) to protecting the rights of the author or community that stewards the code (still TBD).
Early Free Software (predating Open Source) was about protecting community rights: in this case the ones of the hacker communities and authors sharing the software. The extreme depolitization of modern open source, particularly in USA and The Valley, brings hide politics and governance, as is documented in the bitcoin case, the hidden politics of the "apolitic" money. So, there is some kind of pendulum movement from plain Open Source to its re-politization showing again a concern for governance and sustainability of software as a commons.
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I’m interested in figuring out a term that feels inclusive, easy to grok, and free of political baggage.
¿depolitization as inclusion? Seems quite the opposite: market as exclusion, because Free Software (as in Freedom) has been gentrified by "Open Source" and become a commodity for startup building, instead of a conception of technology/knowledge as a right.
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