P-Prompt: Spaces for discomfort - Honesty

We invited Winnie Soon to contribute a prompt because of their work with Lee Tzu-Tung on queering contractual hierarchies and appropriation gestures, and also their energetic participation in the Open Source publishing community through projects such as Servpub and Aesthetic Programming (with Geoff Cox).

Winnie is an artist and academic who often works with grassroots communities and precarious cultural practitioners both in Europe and Asia. They are concerned about the peer pressure that these practitioners might experience when being asked to release a work under a Free Culture or Open Access license. The widespread expectation that openness is in everyones interest might prevent a honest conversation about situated conditions, and resulting anxieties, needs and desires. When we ask Winnie to say more about what they mean by "honesty", they answer: "To be honest with how much one would like to share and what you want from it in return. If one is not happy for others to install or pick up your code and study it, perhaps you should not have the floss license. Or, if you would like to be contacted for every use, just state this." (Winnie Soon, private email)

In this prompt, Winnie asks a series of questions that can help pay attention to the feelings and insecurities involved in making work public. They ask to pause for a moment and double-check which are the right conditions for sharing or not sharing. Making space to feel and acknowledge potential discomfort before releasing a work, means also to make the implications of reuse imaginable. Could such frank and courageous articulations of what is at stake contribute to a practice of reuse in solidarity?

How would each project consider the situatedness of conditions?
In what way the collective/individual would find discomfort when other people (re)use your work?
How would an individual wish others to (re)use?
How could we also acknowledge the power imbalance between privileges and less privileges in free and open source culture, in which there might be a different understanding of extractive use?
How can we be honest with ourselves and our projects?