Free and Open Source Software
Back to syllabus.
Precis
Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) appears to not obey the usual rules of market based economies. Many of those who contribute to the codebase of large F/OSS projects, for example, are unpaid amateurs working in their free time. Startlingly, others are paid to do it. We propose that F/OSS is best understood, in part, using the mechanics of gift economies rather than market economies. These are economies which value reputation over profit, where value is had in the giving, not in the taking, and where the wealthiest are those who have given away the most. Yet capitalism surrounds F/OSS. Linux distributors such as RedHat operate in the market economy even though their products are free, depending on a services based business model.
Yet in addition to the usefulness of gift and market economies as tools for understanding F/OSS, it may be useful to consider the movement as a planning or staged happening. Prof. Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center asserts that F/OSS as a movement is part of a larger planned development of the way we will interact in a digital future. Certainly this is represented in the philosophy of the Free Software Foundation. Yet GNU/Linux, arguably the most successful F/OSS project, was founded by a man not particularly fond of ideology, whose initial motivations seemed to relate more to hobby than philosophy.
In our class we will try to track the economies and motivations that motivate the F/OSS movement, from an insider and an outsider perspective. We will focus of three questions regarding the economies of F/OSS:
- Motivations: Why contribute to F/OSS as a hobbyist, without payment? Alternately, why contribute to F/OSS as a corporation, without claiming IP?
- Capitalism: Where and how does F/OSS meet the bottom-line?
- The Law: Given what we know about F/OSS incentives both in the market and gift economies, how does the American IP regime encourage and discourage F/OSS, and what tweaks would help promote F/OSS?
Although the creative potential of the intellectual commons isn't limited to software, the Internet and computer technology generally enable commons-based creativity in ways never before possible. With F/OSS as an arguable successful specimen of commons-based development ("with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"), how might the model fail or succeed for artistic creation generally?
Fundemental Question
How is F/OSS created, and how should law be reformed to promote and secure F/OSS?
Guest Wish-list
- Mako - as an insider from the F/OSS movement. (awaiting response)
Readings
- The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. Chapter Five "The Gift Community" (p. 96-120).
- The Gift Economy and Free Software, by Jem Matzan.
- Some Simple Economics of Open Source, by Josh Lerner.
- GNU Public License version 3.
Class Twitter Conversation
In addition to the listserv, which will doubtlessly allow us to communicate our thoughts between classes and develop our discussion, we propose to use Twitter to create a simultaneous mode of discussion designed to be informal and strongly conversational. Because Twitter limits entries to 140 characters, the service should naturally lend itself to such discussion.
In order to tie our tweets together, we can use the @hashtags system. Documentation 1 2. We propose to use the #iif tag. Students may read the hashtag using the hashtags.org system or at the Twitter search page. However we recommend that students follow the #iif hashtag using the RSS feed available at hashtags.org. The RSS feed from search.twitter.com unfortunately drops the username originating the tweet. Students are encouraged to investigate other Twitter client applications and RSS readers in order to make it exceptionally easy to read the #iif tweets and to post updates, making the whole endeavor something akin to a chatroom without requiring that we all log in to IRC.