The arguments regarding open-source as culture were surely intriguing. While one side argues that innovation is hard to appear without strong incentives for the effort of creators, the other side of argument is that strong intellectual property right can potentially hinder the flow of information and prevent continuous group efforts of improving creations. By using the examples of software and other media contexts, the article somewhat lean onto the advantages of open-source.
While I strongly agree that better creations are always coming from collaborations of brilliant minds, proprietary knowledge should be protected for economic incentives and from the risk of being open to anyone.
As mentioned before, social media network is consisted of individual users and contents, and accumulation of such contents creates significant value for the network. While users’ content sharing and collaborated works are the primary mean for content creation, the definition of collaboration is rather complex and often the source of debate for content ownership. Hyde and colleagues explained that the act of content sharing alone cannot be constituted as collaboration while many online contents are shared, and the works often stand alone. Hence, ranging from weak to strong, collaboration can occur when the criteria for assessing the strength of a collaboration is met—intention, goals, self-governance, coordination mechanisms, property, knowledge transfer, identity, scale, network topology, accessibility, and equality. On the other hand, in reality, I think that as long as the collaborators’ contributions are acknowledged, it should be fine.
Who would think that giving away brilliant ideas for free was that hard? One may think that any business with a functioning brain will be profited from free idea, but apparently it can only work when there is no extensive infrastructural investment and minimal risk of facing armies of competitors who want to benefit from the first market mover’s hard work. In fact, the series of copyright laws and businesses’ action of protecting their proprietary knowledge can indeed hinder active improvement and flux of creativity. However, when there is no protection for business ideas and investment, it is extremely difficult for businesses to actively use any extraordinary, but free idea. In that sense, I have to say, an excellent business idea is the one that is profitable, marketable, sustainable, and protectable.
The implication of digital open-source in an academic field was particularly intriguing since I am a scholar wannabe. Given the declining funding for publications and library resources, scholarly publishing is becoming increasingly demanding and competitive. Hence, it is natural for scholars to lean toward open-access movement. However, the issue is that there is little or even no sense to give away hard-won research to publishers free of charge in an exchange for gaining glorified status of being a scholar. Proponents of open-access movement argue that, since scholars want publicity, open-source publications satisfy both publishers and scholars. I entirely agree with open-access movement, and I believe that ongoing collaboration in theoretical and empirical level among scholars can truly advance any academic discipline. Nevertheless, the reality is that junior scholars are under tremendous pressure to publish quantitatively and qualitatively for their successful career paths. Besides, many scholarly publications are not considered equal because any academic discipline often has a ranking system for academic publications, and the quality of scholarly works are often evaluated based on the ranking of the journals that scholars’ works were published.
Overall, such movement of open-access will surely govern the future of information exchanges and education. Educators will be forced to revamp their mind set for academic advancement along with their career paths. The definition of academic institution will undergo certain changes because the establishment is no longer the sole source of knowledge. We may be in the turbulent transitional period where the clashes of values are yet to be settled down. One thing for sure is that I will certainly have a career path, which will be slightly different from my professors’.