Open source today
“The open source culture of new media really means one thing today: it means open interfaces. It means the freedom to connect to technical images. Even source code is a kind of interface—an interface into a lowerlevel set of libraries and operation codes. Thus, when Google or Facebook open-sources resource x, it provides an API (application programming interface) granting managed access to x. Let us not be fooled: open source does not mean the unvarnished truth but rather a specific communicative artifice like any other. And in this sense one should never celebrate a piece of source code, open or closed, as a bona fide original text (whatever that might mean). The interesting question is not so much whether open source is more open or less open than other systems of knowledge, but rather the question “How does open source shape systems of storage and transmission of knowledge? […] The bad news—or good, depending on one’s proclivities—is that this source has almost nothing to do with concerns around sources and essences […] Instead one sees that the open sourcing of media systems (information wants to be free, desire wants to be free, capital wants to be free) is really about the migration into a new way of structuring information and material resources, which, as Rancie`re might say, also has its corresponding regime of art. But, as in previous times, one is still free to read the truth of social life through such structures—as Jameson does with his perennially useful methodology known as cognitive mapping—provided, of course, that one is not dazzled by the short-term candy of openness as such.” A. Galloway
