Free and Open Source Software

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Revision as of 11:49, 15 December 2008 by JZ (talk | contribs)
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Topic Owners: dulles,Ayelet


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Precis

Guest wish list

readings

basic questions

  • Copyright and open software – free as in beer v. free as in speech
  • economy v. culture
  • inside and outside – insiders motivation v. legal regime
  • gift v. reputation
  • How can a dispersed, multilingual collection of coders working for free assemble something as complicated as a web browser, let alone an entire operating system? Open-source projects are famously free-wheeling, but different organizational models and tools have sprung up to solve these obstacles.

What are the forces that drive hackers to contribute to open source projects? What, if anything, can we learn from applying theories of gift economies to open source projects? Should we read Lewis Hyde's The Gift? (n.b. i may be motivated by my own desire to read the book -- dulles)

  • Strategies and indemnities (e.g. SCO v. IBM)
  • Questioning the foundations of the free software movement (i.e. the "four freedoms")[1]

how much does access to the source code really matter anymore? Are there alternative theories (e.g. "generativity") that better capture the values at stake? Affero License? (Eben Moglen?)

  • The organization/groups/cooperation questions: how do free software projects organize and govern themselves, and what broader lessons might be learned from it? (e.g. debian, IETF)

Misc

Key will be to crystallize to a particular issue or question. That could be done by selecting one or two academic works in progress by a leading and/or provocative scholar, or it might be done by talking to Eric Raymond about his biggest worries and about the evolution of the Open Source Initiative. A lot of his work has to do with keeping a political coalition together, and he might have some good stories and problems to bring to us. If you're game, maybe reach out to him? JZ 16:49, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
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