Back to the main purpose of this blog, I’ll list here the key questions and the focus I want to give to this project. Don’t expect those questions to be static and decisive. For now, they are simple milestone to guide this investigation.
The main objective of this research consists of understanding the free / open source community’s perception and use of software as a contestation tools against copyright, authorship and intellectual property. This question contain multiple parts:
1- Do the community perceives the F/OSS as contestation tools? By contestation tools, I mean a way to criticize and to pressurize the traditional software corporation and their ideology.
1.1- To achieve this task, I’ll need to understand and summarize what is the ideology behind proprietary software, and what about it pose problem to the F/OSS community.
2- If they do perceive the F/OSS as a contestation tools, how can they act accordingly? What action can they make to challenge the ideology that they stand up against? How do they use those tools?
2.1- What is the place of software as a mean of contestation?
2.2- What is the role of the community versus of the role of individual in this contestation?
This small collection of questions will guide my first step in the community. New questions may arise as I progress, while other may be left out. Nonetheless, it feel like a good base to start on.
The main objective of this research consists of understanding the free / open source community’s perception and use of software as a contestation tools against copyright, authorship and intellectual property. This question contain multiple parts:
1- Do the community perceives the F/OSS as contestation tools? By contestation tools, I mean a way to criticize and to pressurize the traditional software corporation and their ideology.
1.1- To achieve this task, I’ll need to understand and summarize what is the ideology behind proprietary software, and what about it pose problem to the F/OSS community.
2- If they do perceive the F/OSS as a contestation tools, how can they act accordingly? What action can they make to challenge the ideology that they stand up against? How do they use those tools?
2.1- What is the place of software as a mean of contestation?
2.2- What is the role of the community versus of the role of individual in this contestation?
This small collection of questions will guide my first step in the community. New questions may arise as I progress, while other may be left out. Nonetheless, it feel like a good base to start on.
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(Good) Questions deserve to be answered with questions:
ReplyDeleteWhat is the 'community' status of F/OSS-types? Is this a matter of 'collective identity' (diffuse, cultural, submerged, but common nonetheless, e.g. Alberto Melucci - we share values, however loosely), (inter)actively-defined through enacted contacts/shared experience (we worked this out together, or we're in this together, whether we like it or not), or instrumentally-linked (we're looking to get the same results - to some extent - so let's put our differences aside)...or something else?
To quote generally terrible 1990s ska band Buck-o-Nine: "Who are THEY and where do they get their information?"
I'm very much liking the look of your project; I know near-zilch about it, so I'll keep an eye out (and so my su(pplementary/perfluous) question might seem a bit left-field. Cheers.
Indeed, this is a good question that I should have addressed before. The reason I didn't included them in my ethnographic project is mainly because it has been covered by others before me. Nonetheless, it would be a good idea to detail what has been said about it if we want to understand how they act together as a group.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the interest, sometimes when you are too close to your subject, it is good to have someone pointing out obvious thing you miss out.