Open Source Hype Antidotecritical and alternative views on free and open source software
Whether you love what open source stands for or just like writing code, it’s hard to avoid the massive investments in marketing, brand building, and political propaganda around open source. With no shortage of vested interests, it’s easy to find spinsters, fanboys, and would-be revolutionaries extolling countless virtues of open source to nearly any taste.
Here are a few quality pieces to read as antidote to the hype. These writers don’t necessarily criticize open source. Some do, some don’t. But they all approach open source and hacker culture in terms very different from those hocked to the mainstream, often emphasizing history that’s omitted from the popular narrative.
Alphabetically, by first named author:
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Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis’ “From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism”
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Biella Coleman and Mako Hill’s “How Free Became Open and Everything Else Under the Sun”
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Drew Crawford’s “Beyond Open Source”
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Primavera De Filippi and Miguel Said Vieira’s “The Commodification of Information Commons”, in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, volume 16, number 1, 2014
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Ashe Dryden’s “The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community”
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Garfinkel, Weise, and Strassmann’s The UNIX-HATERS Handbook
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Don Goodman-Wilson’s “Open Source is Broken” and “A Post-Open Source World”
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Mako Hill’s “When Free Software Isn’t Better”, essay and talk
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Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits, Parts II and III
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David Lancashire’s “Code, Culture and Cash: The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development”
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Peter Levine, Andreessen Horowitz, “Open Source: From Community to Commercialization”
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Peter Levine, “Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source”
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Evgeny Morozov’s “The Meme Hustler”
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Thomas Streeter’s The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet
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Tiziana Terranova’s “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy”, in Social Text Volume 18, Number 2, in the summer of 2000
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Michael Tiemann’s view of the GNU Manifesto as “a business plan in disguise”, as in Open Sources: Voices From the Open Source Revolution and on his homepage
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Luis Villa’s “Stallman, Nussbaum, and Sen: Putting ‘Freedom’ in Context” talk at LibrePlanet
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Jeremy Allison’s “Copyleft and the Cloud” talk at CopyleftConf 2020 (with thanks to Janne Blomqvist)
If something’s missing from this list, send me an e-mail.
Your thoughts and feedback are always welcome by e-mail.