« Community members are decidedly NOT free to build ties that might oblige others to explain themselves, which is exactly what women’s groups do, and exactly why they are considered problematic. If someone does not like being in one software project, the accepted course of action is to simply start another project else- where, not create an obligation for that community to include you. This particular form of exchange means that others can push the technology along further only AS individually willful agents who have taken it upon themselves to ‘read the f***ing manual.’ »
« In F/LOSS, openness relies on a steadfastly closed epistemological frame that not only constitutes technology as apart from persons, but shapes this separability in such a way that code is more than just outside the realm of the social: it is downright FREED from it. The social here is not exactly orthogonal to the technical as F/LOSS imagination has it; rather, social forms shape how ties are SEVERED, as well as how they are built, between people. Not needing to know with whom code is being exchanged, or having a stake in their concerns, is as central to F/LOSS as open scrutiny to improve code quality. »
the couple of paragraphs which include this do pack a theoretical wollop, but unfortunately Dawn Nafus does not have the rhetorical prowess of Marx