Abstract
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.
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