Free software/free science | Kelty | First Monday

peter.suber's bookmarks 2018-12-11

Summary:

"Over the last few years, as the Open Source/Free Software movement has become a constant in the business and technology press, generating conferences, spawning academic investigations and business ventures alike, one single question seems to have beguiled nearly everyone: "how do you make money with free software?"

If the question isn't answered with a business plan, it is inevitably directed towards some notion of "reputation". The answer goes: Free Software programmers do what they love, for whatever reason, and if they do it well enough they gain a reputation for being a good coder, or at least a loud one. Throughout the discussions, reputation functions as a kind of metaphorical substitute for money - it can spill over into real economies, be converted via better jobs or consulting gigs, or be used to make decisions about software projects or influence other coders. Like money, it is a form of remuneration for work done, where the work done is measured solely by the individual, each person his or her own price for creating something. Unlike money, however, it is also often seen as a kind of property. Reputation is communicated by naming, and the names that count are those of software projects and the people who contribute to them. This sits uneasily beside the knowledge that free software is in fact a kind of real (or legal) property (i.e. copyrighted intellectual property). The existence of free software relies on intellectual property and licensing law (Kelty, forthcoming; Lessig, 1999).

In considering the issue, most commentators seem to have been led rather directly to similar questions about the sciences. After all, this economy of reputation sounds extraordinairily familiar to most participants [1]. In particular two claims are often made: 1) That free software is somehow 'like' science, and therefore good; and, 2) That free software is - like science - a well-functioning 'gift economy' (a form of meta-market with its own currency) and that the currency of payment in this economy is reputation. These claims usually serve the purpose of countering the assumption that nothing good can come of system where individuals are not paid to produce. The assumption it hides is that science is naturally and essentially an open process - one in which truth always prevails.

The balance of this paper examines these claims, first through a brief tour of some works in the history and social study of science that have encountered remarkably similar problems, and second by comparing the two realms with respect to their "currencies" and "intellectual property" both metaphorical and actual...."

Link:

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/902/811

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.floss oa.open_science oa.software oa.analogies oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.libre

Date tagged:

12/11/2018, 11:04

Date published:

12/11/2018, 06:04