Open TO All: A Postmodern Perspective on Product Development and Brands in an Open Source Environment

While open source product development and innovation is not a new phenomenon, it is a prominent form of offering development in the post-industrial age, facilitated by networked communication media. Understanding open source presents challenges to practitioners and academics alike. This article explores the open source phenomenon using themes characterising postmodernism, which is particularly apt to an information-rich context such as open source. The article defines and describes open source and then examines the phenomenon using the postmodern themes of fragmentation, dedifferentiation, time and space interaction, antifoundationalism and the values of paradox, reflexivity, and pastiche. The contention is that postmodernism illuminates thinking concerning open source as a means of invention and production in the information age, just as modernism illuminated thinking in the traditional approaches to physical invention and production in the industrial age.