Introduction: Open Source Culture and Aesthetics

Like many phenomena that emerged parallel to that “place” we call the Internet, open source production has long been described via metaphors of spatiality, location, and presence. This trend likely started with programmer and open source software advocate Eric S. Raymond’s early influential essays “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (1997) and “Homesteading the Noosphere” (1999), both of which compare open source projects to a variety of public and private spaces, ecosystems, and architectural forms.¹ In the late 1990s and through the last decade, as discussion of the politics of open source production has shifted more explicitly toward questions of copyright, appropriation, and intellectual property, open source proponents have increasingly invoked “the commons”—noncommodified public spaces and land areas—as conceptual reference points for rethinking intellectual property rights via the long and depressing history of the privatization of such resources.² Without glossing over too many internal variations within these analogies, we might state that their connecting thread has most often been an emphasis on the relative novelty of open source projects, their scarcity among trends toward the increasing commodification of materials and services, and their general distinction from and counterposition to the traditional practices of capitalist economies; in other words, if open source and subsequent practices of participatory culture and voluntary collaborative labor have long been thought of as locations, it is perhaps because of their hoped-for function as some “other place”: a heterotopia or utopia that is surrounded on all sides by the much larger and more familiar terrain of the global market.³

By contrast the contributors to this special issue on “Open Source Culture and Aesthetics” might be taken as both privileging a temporal rather than spatial approach to thematizing open source production as well as disputing its peripheral status; more specifically, they all craft their point of intervention in reference to questions of periodization, suggesting that a broad historical transformation is under way as the primary pragmatic principles of open source software communities—that production and distribution processes can be made both more efficient and effective by leveraging the labor, contributions, and feedback of large groups of users—increasingly seem central to, rather than a novelty within, contemporary economic and cultural production. This shift in perspective might be more properly taken as more than just an alternative framework for comparison. Rather, it marks a moment in which open source ceases to be understandable by way of comparisons to other phenomena and instead takes on its own explanatory value. And, indeed, open source as a term or concept has become its own analogical referent, one that links a vast field of practices moving far from its initial origins and intentions in software programming. Although we briefly detail the arc of this expansion later in this essay, we leave the final word on the importance of this origin, as well as how appropriate it is to configure it as an antecedent to what we are calling “open source culture and aesthetics,” to Christopher Kelty, who reads the works of the other authors collected here through the filter of his own ethnographic research on open source software communities, and his perspective as a more-than-interested observer in how the concepts and techniques popularized there have been integrated into everything from bioinformatics to social media. For now, however, we take it for granted that constitutive features of the production model incubated in free and open source software programming have spread dramatically in three general directions:

1. 1. a multiplication in what vectors can be taken to occupy the role of “source” beyond the realm of computer programming, with genetic “code” being perhaps the most notable and literal substitution, but one followed by “open content” systems for knowledge production and reference such as Wikipedia, and various other endeavors encouraging the creation of alternative and nonproprietary licensing arrangements for phenomena typically recognized as intellectual property, from chemical compositions to artistic works,⁴

2. 2. an even larger field of processes that leverage the distribution and organization of voluntary (unremunerated) labor found in crowdsourcing (the outsourcing of portions of a larger task to an indefinite...