Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed. (2005) _Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy_, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.

The case for collaboration is made by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh in his introduction to _Code_ (2005), establishing how the dynamics operate both in terms of self-organisation and along ideological lines. The ideological dimension is exemplified by the free software movement protecting 'freedoms' but he emphasises that collaboration works more fundamentally than this as part of the human condition. Some of the anthropological work around open source and free software communities and networks help to substantiate this claim (for instance, James Leach's 'Modes of Creativity and the Register of Ownership', in Ghosh 2005, and more recently Christopher M. Kelty's _Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software_, 2008, that studies Free Software ethnographically rather than simply treating geeks as natives - see notes below). At the heart of this are a set of assumptions about creativity in terms of aesthetics, pleasure, cultural and economic value. As Leach, points out, the issue of collective production is often simplified to that of a 'tribal commons' when things are far more complex (2005: 31). The question for Leach is how technologies that establish collaboration as more and more central to economic production are effected by and effect 'ownership regimes'. When it comes to creativity, ideas are extracted from the commons and modified by creative and intellectual labour such that the issue of ownership and property arises as a problem in a (Western) culture that has stressed creativity as inextricably bound to individualism. In other parts of the world, especially historically, ownership related to creative work is far more multiple and distributed, connected to quite different spiritual and political principles. An example of this are 'spirit songs' in Papua New Guinea, where, although based on ancestral heritage, they are constantly changed and modified but with the underlying condition that 'spirits and people belong to one another' (Leach 2005: 33-34; These are called 'Tambaran' songs). They are generated by collective voices. The complexity lies in the fact that people and spirits are equivalents in a relational system. Ownership is bound to relations in such a model, and as multiple agents for future action.  

This is quite different from the conventions of copyright that remains based on capitalistic property relations:
'People do own images, and ideational forms, but these are not owned in objects. In other words, they do not rely on the separation of mental/ ideational creativity from its instantiation in an object that can then be owned as property. The same goes for people themselves. They, too, have reproductive potential because of their constitution in the work of others. They can be owned and transacted, but not as property, rather as elements in other's projects.' (2005: 35)

In such a model, process is privileged over product. Leach's argument is that comparisons can be drawn with the sense of multiple ownership expressed in free software development. The conditions for creativity, as he puts it, is not bound to individualised private property (2005: 38). His example is the development of the GNU/Linux operating system where each individual's work is valued in the context of the multiple efforts of all contributors, but importantly the relations are still expressed between people and things as opposed to relations between persons even as a consequence of copyleft (such as GNU GPL). Intellectual property rights enforce the relation with object, making ideas into an object, and indeed making social relations into an object undermining other forms of collaborative working that might attempt to take property and indeed the law out of objects. To Leach, this is also a critique of current ideas around innovation and value creation that disregards the value of heritage and a deeper understanding of creative processes (2005: 41), and thereby underplays the importance of relations and multiple agency.  

Perhaps this is where peer to peer production is a radical departure. This is broadly what Yochai Benkler refers to as 'commons-based peer production' as a distinct form of organisation of productive activity ('Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm', in Ghosh, 2005: 169). Indeed, as one example, the production of peer-produced free software poses problems for traditional understandings of organisations as descriptions of the productive activities of employees in a firm or buyers as part of a market (the wage and price, accordingly - here, Benkler is drawing upon the economist Ronald Coase's essay 'The Nature of the Firm', of 1937), as does academic peer production in a more general understanding of the nature of information and networked informational exchange. What information technology has contributed is a more efficient and more pervasive mechanism for peer production to accelerate. Benkler's view is pragmatic: peer production works because it best matches human capital to projects; it is efficient if intellectual property is not restrictive as it relies on the wide availability of resources and open collaboration. Peer production suggests that the public realm is good for innovation outside of capitalistic relation of property. 

In 'Fencing Off Ideas: Enclosure and the Disappearance of the Public Domain', James Boyle refers to the period in history when common land was turned into private property (in Ghosh 2005). The essay begins with an anonymous poem from 1821, although the tendency can be traced to the fifteenth century:
'The law locks up the man or woman; Who steals the goose from off the common; But leaves the greater villain loose; Who steals the common from off the goose. The law demands that we atone; When we take things we do not own; But leaves the lords and ladies fine; Who take things that are yours are mine. The poor and wretched don't escape; If they conspire the law to break; This must be so but they endure; Those who conspire to make the law. The law locks up the man or woman; Who steals the goose from off the common; And geese will still a common lack; Till they go and steal it back.' (2005: 235) 

The parallels to code are obvious, and often stated in the ways that intellectual property is being privatised and the way that code as an intangible object outside the marketplace is being forced into the property regime. Boyles's example of the 'second enclosure movement' is the human genome that surely belongs to the 'common heritage of humankind' rather than individuals or corporations (2005: 237). However, patents have been granted for gene sequences and stem cells in a clear violation of commonality and the common good. With reference to the poem, perversely what the law has largely protected are the data lords and ladies from anyone who attempts to steal back what is rightfully commonly owned.

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Christopher M. Kelty (2008) _Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software_, Durham: Duke University Press. 
Florian Cramer (2008) 'Interview with Christopher Kelty: the Culture of Free Software' (with Geert Lovink), <nettime> 26/08/2008.

The wider history and cultural significance of Free Software is developed in Christopher Kelty's _Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software_ (2008) as a set of cultural practices. In this sense, it is a manifestation of knowledge and power but presents a range of practices that are ripe with contradictions. This is evident in the ambiguities of key concepts such as 'openness', and in Kelty's book a chapter addresses this issue head on by shifting the discussion from how meanings are produced to the practical choices available - underpinned by Kelty's anthropological understanding of the term culture and networked culture. In response to this, Florian Cramer also addresses the concept of 'freedom' (making reference to Calum Selkirk) to explain how source code should not be 'welded shut': 
'The concept of "freedom" that serves as the lowest common denominator of FLOSS simply is consumer rights, nothing more, nothing less. [...] The "freedoms" that are defined, almost identically, in GNU's "Free Software Definition", Debian's "Social Contract" and OSI's "Open Source Definition" are nothing more than a educated common sense about computer software that doesn't fuck its users in the small print and doesn't turn them into proprietary upgrade dependents for the rest of their lives. The popular comparison of FLOSS with a car whose hood isn't welded shut therefore sums it all up. The only difference, which not even many FLOSS activists realized in the beginning, lies in the implication for culture: that welding the hood of _information_ technology shut reaches farther and is infinitely scarier than keeping transportation technology proprietary.' (2008)

The two terms - free software and open source - correspond to two parallel narratives in the late 1990s: free software referring back to the 1980s when software freedom in resistance to proprietary software was promoted (associated with Richard Stallman); and open source emanating from the dotcom boom and free market thinking that free software offered economic benefit (associated with Eric Raymond). Releasing source code therefore represents a number of ambiguities relating to trust, cost, liberty, making free but making money on the stock market instead, a belief in open standards or a cynical business move to capitalise on free labour. There are competing ideologies here, and even the common denial of ideology within the open source community is a demonstration of ideology in itself (as Zizek has pointed out elsewhere); they share material practices but not ideologies. The distinction is perhaps best articulated in that free software describes a social movement whereas open source is a development methodology (Kelty 2008: 113; and they are both recursive publics to Kelty). 

Underpinning both at a more fundamental level is source code and the sharing of source code, itself rooted in the history of the UNIX operating system and its precarious position between the public domain and commercial enterprise (first written in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie at Bell Labs, in Kelty 2008: 125). If UNIX became the most widely used and portable operating system, caught between academic and corporate worlds, the key to its success was the distribution of source code as part of the system - allowing users to maintain it, support it, extend it and share it. Thus, beyond the obvious technical accomplishment and its pervasiveness, it served to establish a paradigm of sharing in three key areas of practice: porting, teaching and forking source code (Kelty 2008: 141).  

The intersecting terms 'open source' and 'free software' are often locked into a straightforward description of producing and releasing software rather than a wider discussion of organisation, sociality and the production of meaning. The cultural significance for Kelty is captured by the term 'recursive public' to account for the ways in which the public is: 'vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives' (2008: 3). 

Somewhat related to the concept of the 'public sphere', a recursive public is capable of modifying itself through participation, relatively unmediated by higher authority. For Kelty, the collective technical experiment of the Free Software movement is an example of a recursive pubic that draws attention to its democratic and political significance and the limitations of our understanding of the 'public' in the light of the restructuring of power over networks. In a sense, the concept of the public sphere itself is taken as open to modification and reuse - it is made recursive in other words. As a consequence, a reconceptualisation of political action is required that combines traditional forms of expression such as free speech with coding practices and sharing associated with Free Software. Kelty's intervention is to extend a definition of a public grounded in discourse - through speech, writing and assembly - to other legal and technical layers that underpin the Internet in recognition of the ways in which power and control are structured - both discourses and infrastructures (2008: 50; Kelty's example is the case of Napster). In this way, recursive publics engage with and attempt to modify the infrastructures they inhabit as an extension of the public sphere. The publicness is constituted not simply by speaking, writing, arguing and protesting but also through modification of the domain or platform through which these practices are enacted. This is encapsulated by the phrase 'running code' to describe the relationship between 'argument-by-technology and argument-by-talk' (2008: 58; Kelty later refers to how the the free software recursive public turns from a 'class-in-itself to a class-for-itself' and therefore represents radical transformation, 2008: 116). Software is both expression as in speech or writing but also something that performs actions.  

In the chapter 'Conceiving Open Systems', Kelty examines the unruly term 'open', and asks whether it is more a means or a means to an end (2008: 143). He charts the development of the UNIX operating system and the TCP/IP protocol of the Internet as an open system (note: TCP/IP is Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol). Standardisation and openness underpin a quite different protocol of preferred order that exemplify the 'moral-technical imaginary of a recursive public' for Kelty (2008: 145). It was the need for interchangeability, interoperability, and networking that led to the adoption of an open systems method in the 1980s as hardware, software and systems diversified. It seems that rather than an end or goal being set, that openness was more a cultural paradigm, encapsulating the principles of liberal democracy and the free market as well as the open exchange of knowledge. But crucial to an understanding of the use of the term 'open' is that its opposite is not 'closed' but 'proprietary', and hence it takes on moral significance around monopoly control and ownership. What emerged from the various 'open-systems battles' since the 1980s was a 'partially articulated infrastructure of operating systems, networks, and markets' (Kelty 2008: 177), underpinned by moral divisions over intellectual property.  

What is important for Kelty's argument is that experimentation and developments in the culture of free software reflects an emergent and self-organizing public actions - the recursive public as he puts it. In this way he considers free software to operate as a critique that supplements the idea of the public sphere.