infobong.com

I'm working on a term paper on Wikipedia and it's Countering Systemic Bias project. One of the sections I'm working on deals with the ideology that seems to pervade open-source software development as well as projects like Wikipedia, but I'm sort of at a loss of what to call it "Open Source Ideology" seems to make the most sense to people with a casual understanding of the issue, but because of the tensions between "Free Software" and "open source" partisans, it's not quite appropriate. From the point of view of Free Software advocates, "open source" means corporate co-optation of the development process, so it's probably not the best term to use.

I frankly don't like the GNU folks (I once got a tongue-lashing from Brad Kuhn of the Free Software Foundation back when I edited a newsletter called "Enterprise Linux") so I'm hesitant to use their language as well. I've seen the acronym "FOSS" for "Free/Open-Source Software,' but FOSS will make absolutely no sense to my prof or nearly anyone else in my media studies milieu. Besides, I think the word "open" best expresses the fundamental goals of Free Software, Creative Commons, Free Culture, and the like. I think I finally settle on something like "'Open' Ideology" or "Ideology of Openness" to describe what I'm taking about.

The American Studies department is hosting a grad student conference in the fall with the theme "Defining 'American' Values," and I'm going to submit an abstract about "The Ideology of Openness" - or whatever I wind up calling it - to the conference. I talked to one of the organizers, and she said that they're as interested in subcultural values as well as the dominant ideology, so I just need to come up with a name. What prompted me to post on this topic was the realization that I've never read Eric S. Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar cover-to-cover. I should probably sit down with this book before I start working on the abstract.