4S notes: Hackers and Tinkerers III: Complicating the Producer-Consumer Relationship
SILTALA, Juha; FREEMAN, Stephanie :
Freedom and Profit: How Hackers and Suits Are Working It Out on the Desktop
- OpenOffice (associated with Sun) vs. GNOME (associated with hacker community) – What sort of contradictions emerge when a hybrid culture brings together two cultures with competing motives? – Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt – sponsored by Novell, announcement: “Complete the hack, enter the contest, collect the prize” – Hijacking of the “glow code”
ITO, Kenji :
User Creativity in Digital Content: The Case of Freeware Role-Playing Games Production in Japan – Case study of “RPG Tkool 2000”, commercial game authoring tool
– Manufactured by Enterbrain Inc. – Demo of a simple game – Code for game very simple, generated by using drop-down menus – Users can create additional tools – Community: competition drew over 790 entrys – Diversity of narratives, fostered in part by limited graphical capability
COLEMAN, Gabriella, GRUBB, Alex:
Realizing Freedom: The Culture of Liberalism and Hacker Ethical Practice – Karl Fogel (Free Software) and Kevin Mitnick (“Social Engineer”) both self-identify as “Hackers”, but Fogel doesn’t consider Mitnick one… – Problem with literature on Hackers
– Backlash against naive media reports in 1990’s
– Very sophisticated moral views don’t show up – Three tentendies:
– Borsook’s description of hackers as antisocial, “cyberselfish” (psychological essentialism)
– “Hacker Ethic” of good hackers vs. bad crackers (utopian sanitation)
– Douglas’ sense of “there were bad hackers, but now there are good ones (generational simplicity) – Alternative (content, form, history)
– Content = Liberalism – basic values of limited government, right to property, contractarian
– 4 distinctions
– individual freedom vs. social good
– public vs. private sphere
– role of government intervention (New Deal vs. Libertatian)
– tolerance
– Form
– Moral Genres of Action (Bakhtin’s speech genres)