Open Source as Culture/Culture as Open Source

Standard

In recent years, the term “open source” is increasingly used a a synonym for “free”. We often hear of “open source software”, “open source music”, “open source movies” etc. Such extension of the label “open source” has proved to be beneficial for the open source community as it makes it easier to imagine the success of such efforts. The attempts to provision other kinds of cultural goods under the same terms have had
some success in the recent years, with Wikipedia as the most notable example. This example shows everyday people how open source manages to recapture and revitalise communications and cultural processes around them.

“The open-source model of peer production, sharing, revision, and peer review has distilled and labeled the most successful creative habits into a political movement.”

Although many open source programmes and softwares cast the free culture and its use in a positive light, there are still copyright infringement concerns associated with it. We cannot ignore that with so much content available for free, there would be individuals misappropriating content; this is largely a legal concern and therefore affects the mainstream acceptance of the open source model.