Writing in the Disciplines versus Corporate Workplaces: On the Importance of Conflicting Disciplinary Discourses in the Open Source Movement and the Value of Intellectual Property

Writing programs and more specifically, Writing in the Disciplines (WID) initiatives have begun to embrace the use of and the ideology inherent to, open source software. The Conference on College Composition and Communication has passed a resolution stating that whenever feasible educators and their institutions consider open source applications. Although well-intended, open source ideology often runs counter to a corporate business culture that produces revenue from aggressively protecting intellectual property. Such aggressiveness helps contribute to the perception of a rigid binary between open source and corporate communities. This article challenges WID scholars and instructors to better acknowledge the complexity of corporate discourses and to develop more nuanced stances in regard to open source and intellectual property. The merits of open source are not simply attacked here but instead the article insists that as WID ponders open source that the discourses from the corporate workplace are not ignored. The concern is that the values inherent in the open source community and built into the technologies it produces are the dominant or only influence on how writing instructors approach intellectual property. This article begins with an examination of open source values and their tenuous relationship to intellectual property law. The remainder of the article is an examination of why and where WID is appropriating open source technologies and its influential development model. Brief recommendations are offered for specific technologies and the article explains how regardless of monetary savings, open source applications enable a more robust critical literacy in the WID classroom. English departments, writing programs, and to a certain extent the humanities in general display a growing enthusiasm for embracing open source software and along with it, its development ideology. Embedded within that ideology is an attitude toward intellectual property that endorses alternative licensing options in order to promote knowledge sharing. In addition, the open source development model welcomes collaboration, favors interaction, and insists on an intense focus on the audience or end-user. All of these concepts, even imported from the world of software, resemble familiar values to those who teach writing and adhere to a writing pedagogy advocating revision and multiple iterations of student work. As scholars who research intersections of writing and technology have noted, "[w]henever humans invent and build a technology, they build in values, even if they do not intend to" (Gurak, 2005, p. 209). And as responsible,