The idea is hardly new; it's been very well-known, widely used, and widely studied for decades, and not just in IT. For example, in the corporate world Hasbro created an FOSS license for significant aspects of the game Dungeons & Dragons back in the 2000s. And the public obviously embraced FOSS and crowd-sourcing over and over - wikis on every game and hobby, fan fiction, Minecraft, etc. What is new in this book? What is the impetus? What audience needs to be told about Wikipedia?
Also, why change the terminology from free/libre open source, crowd-sourcing, etc.?
[–] RogueMario 15 hours ago
[–] mmooss 14 hours ago
And that terminology comes ready made with more nuanced ideas like 'free-as-in-beer' and 'free-as-in-speech' (from a less formal tradition).
I'm not criticizing it; they must know the terminology and concepts I'm referring to. I'm curious about what distinguishes their ideas from the commonplace FLOSS concepts.
(Are you an author?)
"The final trait — the fact that peer production creates resources protected as a commons (sometimes called a “common- property regime”) distinguishes the outputs of peer production as public resources that anyone can access or use without money changing hands or the negotiation of cumbersome licensing agreements. This aspect of peer production was deeply important to Benkler, and helps justify the use of a specialized term to differentiate modes of production rooted in market- based exchange or government fiat from those that occur in peer production. Yet because the term “commons- based peer production” is a mouthful, we follow others — including Benkler himself — by shortening it to “peer production.”"