Missed this great short piece by Dafne Calvo when it ran last May:
At present, knowledge runs the risk of being capitalised by investing in proprietary software for analysis; by imposing fees for downloading scientific articles; by making methodological and theoretical decisions depending on the most cited trends. The production, consumption, and distribution of scientific outputs inspired by free culture offers practical solutions and alternatives to these problems.
One benefit of applying free culture principles to academic life—as Calvo notes—is what it means for core software and infrastructure: This stuff should be open source rather than propriety and locked down. The Invest in Open Infrastructure project is crucial in this respect, but I think we need a software ownership map too—a charting of the octopus-like conglomeration in scholar-oriented software. (Atypon, for example, is owned by Wiley—but masks this fact.) Maps and databases of this kind for mass media ownership have been a staple of media criticism for decades—like this new one.