Peer2Politics

The term Open Source refers primarily to software development, as ‘the result of a collaborative effort of different people, following diverging personal or collective agendas when participating in this process’.1 The engagement in such procedure is not necessarily connected to a financial gain reward, but could also aspire to peer recognition and aesthetic pleasure or could derive from a particular sociopolitical belief. The advantages characterizing the open–source development structure are numerous and point towards a direction where the production of software is horizontal and the algorithm maintains its transparency, meaning that it is clean of any hidden features that promote external goals. Open–source software represents a GNU–license model of ownership and, distinguished for its originality, it has already influenced, not only the process of software development and its licensing structure, but also the design community that uses, modifies and re–distributes it

It completely upsets our notion of manufacturing, where commodities are tangible objects. Physical would become virtual. The question would then become: open-source or closed-source?