David M. Berry (2008) _Copy, Rip, Burn: the Politics of Copyleft and Open Source_ Pluto Press.

Clearly there is much speculation on the social implications of open source. But alarmingly, the concept of the 'public' is underplayed in discussions as if public good can be achieved in a straightforward manner. Berry also uses the term 'commons' in relation to intellectual property, the 'intellectual commons', and is keen to uncover some of the ambiguities of the term in a situation where it seem to be interchangeable with 'public domain/sphere', and the 'creative commons' or GNU GPL of the digital commons (2008: 79). Behind this is identification of common assets and digital objects, and the ways these are organised, governed, used in practice, and then are subject to particular ownership regimes. The importance of a discussion of the intellectual commons lies in emphasising that this is not simply a legal issue but an institutional one (echoing Rossiter), and one that necessitates political action to protect the commons from privateers. Indeed arguably new forms of politics emerge out of these socio-techncal networks - 'new online social formations' with communicative dimensions (as Berry puts it, 2008: 190).
(Kelty follows well from here)

In 'The Contestation of Code', Berry also points out how 'openness' has tended to be understood through transparency and freedom that is based on individualist notion of how society might be better organised (2008: 182). Indeed open source ideology can be used to ignore the concept of the public. Similarly the Free Software movement, although stressing community-driven processes and action, avoids a wider discussion of democracy, or more precisely democratic freedoms. For Berry, the arguments are far too rooted in an 'engineering philosophy of technology' (2008: 185; this is something peer production has attempted to do as a post-capitalist alternative to standard democratic models - here I am thinking of the P2P Foundation in particular). He explains that Stallman' position is that technology can save us from technology, more not less technology rather than recognising the ways in which technology is shaped by society. The Free Software Foundation is at best, a kind of guild or trade union for programmers (Berry 2008: 192), with a radical kernel but one not fully formed into a radical politics as such. More specifically, coding practices are subject to similar ideological compromises such that skill and efficiency are emphasised as opposed to broader conditions in which networks take on more significance in terms of articulations of power. The network offers alternative form to traditional ways of organising human actions (such as those associate with representational democracies). Clearly technology and software increasingly mediate our realities in ways that necessitate a deep understanding of and access to source codes. How otherwise to take part in public affairs?  

Against technical and instrumental understandings of FLOSS, Berry argues that social issues such as those related to labour, property rights and control are inherently encoded in software. For Berry, this is 'The Poetics of Code' (2008: 188) and one that emphasises human creativity. By poetics, Berry is pointing to the creative and communicative turn in understanding sociality, underpinned by the ways in which 'capital attempts to own and control meaning and culture (and mediated by code)' (2008: 192). He insists that FLOSS represents 'technologies of the commons' (with the free software developer, operating like an artist in a similar way to the way Hannah Arendt suggested the artist is the only real worker in society, 2008: 194). Drawing on Arendt's distinctions between work and action, and indeed an understanding of code as a speech act (in a footnote), Berry suggests that FLOSS offers the potential for political action based on 'decentralised, transparent, non-market commons-based production'; a 'politics of the commons' (2008: 199). Furthernmore, he likens this to poetics through its root as 'poeisis' meaning 'to bring forth, to lead or to bring out - in other words, to produce' (2008: 2000). In this way, poetry is understood as something not present that is brought into action, rather like source code. To Berry, the commons is brought forth in a similar fashion, and through code in the case of FLOSS, into sociality and the public realm where politics resides.