The rise of open sourced software has become a crucial part of the collaborative element to produsage. Open sourced software is a software package that is openly available to collaborate by a greater community of produsers working together to aid others in the creation, testing and the development of these softwares. The software is a continual process that is constantly updated and upgraded by members of the community. The alternative is closed sourced software which is created by companies by a selected few developers rather than the open community. The software packages are released in hard copy form in close ended versions. The critical differences between the two softwares favours open-sourced as it has a significantly larger number of producers working together (essentially everybody online) as well as the on-going process eliminated the need for selling hard copies of the software as new versions will become regularly updated. (Bruns, 04) states that “any one software package prodused by the open source community, or any one creative work developed by a distributed group of co-creators within a creative commons licensing framework, should be seen as nothing more than a temporary artefact of an ongoing process of produsage”. With the rise in open-sourced software came complications in which blurred the lines in regards to licensing and ownership. To rectify these issues the following was established “such rules (as enshrined in a variety of moral and legal documents including the GNU General Public License and Free Documentation License, the Open Source License, and the Creative Commons license framework) commonly stipulate, for example, that community-held content must remain freely available, that modifications of such content must be made available once again under similar conditions, and that the contributions of individual produsers to the shared project must be recognised and (where appropriate) rewarded” (Snurb, 2007). With the evolution of online communities and the introduction of produsage as a way of defining our behaviour online we see traditional methods becoming less favourable and inefficient to satisfy the needs of society. As explained in Old vs New Media how the traditions of television, radio, video outlets and even cinema are all easily accessible through the internet. The same is happening in a variety of other areas such as software. Traditionally to acquire software one world need to purchase it at a bricks and mortar store, load many discs for every one program to find that a newer version will be available in a months time. Those days are quickly coming to a close where simply download straight to your computer saves the hassle with constant updated software available regularly. Whether the need for the traditional method of acquiring software will become outdated completely is debatable however it is evident that the rise in community collaboration and demand for open-sourced software will increase exponentially.
ReferencesBruns, A. 2008. Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation.
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