Open source

Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology. Before the term open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; open source gained hold with the rise of the Internet, and the attendant need for massive retooling of the computing source code. Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. Subsequently, a new, three-word phrase "open source software" was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.

The open source model includes the concept of concurrent yet different agendas and differing approaches in production, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in commercial software companies. A main principle and practice of open source software development is peer production by bartering and collaboration, with the end-product, source-material, "blueprints" and documentation available at no cost to the public. This is increasingly being applied in other fields of endeavor, such as biotechnology.

History

The concept of open source and free sharing of technological information existed long before computers. For example, cooking recipes have been shared since the beginning of human culture. Open source can pertain to businesses and to computers, software and technology.

In the early years of automobile development, a group of capital monopolists owned the rights to a 2 cycle gasoline engine patent originally filed by George B. Selden. By controlling this patent, they were able to monopolize the industry and force car manufacturers to adhere to their demands, or risk a lawsuit. In 1911, independent automaker Henry Ford won a challenge to the Selden patent. The result was that the Selden patent became virtually worthless and a new association (which would eventually become the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association) was formed. Open source on the Internet began when the Internet was just a message board, and progressed to more advanced presentation and sharing forms like a Web site. There are now many Web sites, organizations and businesses that promote open source sharing of everything from computer code to mechanics of improving a product, technique, or medical advancement.

The label “open source” was adopted by some people in the free software movement at a strategy session held at Palo Alto, California, in reaction to Netscape's January 1998 announcement of a source code release for Navigator. The group of individuals at the session included Christine Peterson who suggested “open source”, Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Jon Hall, Sam Ockman, Michael Tiemann and Eric S. Raymond. Over the next week, Raymond and others worked on spreading the word. Linus Torvalds gave an all-important sanction the following day. Phil Hughes offered a pulpit in Linux Journal. Richard Stallman, pioneer of the free software movement, flirted with adopting the term, but changed his mind. Those people who adopted the term used the opportunity before the release of Navigator's source code to free themselves of the ideological and confrontational connotations of the term "free software". Netscape released its source code under the Netscape Public License and later under the Mozilla Public License.

The term was given a big boost at an event organized in April 1998 by technology publisher Tim O'Reilly. Originally titled the “Freeware Summit” and later known as the “Open Source Summit”, The event brought together the leaders of many of the most important free and open source projects, including Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, Eric Allman, Guido van Rossum, Michael Tiemann, Paul Vixie, Jamie Zawinski of Netscape, and Eric Raymond. At that meeting, the confusion caused by the name free software was brought up. Tiemann argued for “sourceware” as a new term, while Raymond argued for “open source.” The assembled developers took a vote, and the winner was announced at a press conference that evening. Five days later, Raymond made the first public call to the free software community to adopt the new term. The Open Source Initiative was formed shortly thereafter. (also termed 'knowledge good') aspect. In general, this suggests that the original work involves a great deal of time, money, and effort. However, the cost of reproducing the work is very low, so that additional users may be added at zero or near zero cost — this is referred to as the marginal cost of a product. At this point, it is necessary to consider a copyright. The idea of copyright for works of authorship is to protect the incentive of making these original works. Copyright restriction then creates access costs on consumers who value the original more than making an additional copy but value the original less than its price. Thus, they will pay an access cost of this difference. Access costs also pose problems for authors who wish to create something based on another work but are not willing to pay the copyright holder for the rights to the copyrighted work. The second type of cost incurred with a copyright system is the cost of administration and enforcement of the copyright.

Being organised effectively as a consumers' cooperative, the idea of open source is then to eliminate the access costs of the consumer and the creator by reducing the restrictions of copyright. This will lead to creation of additional works, which build upon previous work and add to greater social benefit. Additionally some proponents argue that open source also relieves society of the administration and enforcement costs of copyright. Organizations such as Creative Commons have websites where individuals can file for alternative “licenses”, or levels of restriction, for their works. These self-made protections free the general society of the costs of policing copyright infringement. Thus, on several fronts, there is an efficiency argument to be made on behalf of open sourced goods.

Others argue that society loses through open sourced goods. Because there is a loss in monetary incentive to the creation of new goods, some argue that new products will not be created. This argument seems to apply particularly well to the business model where extensive research and development is done, e.g. pharmaceuticals. However, this argument ignores the fact that cost reduction for all concerned is perhaps an even better monetary incentive than is a price increase. In addition, others argue that visual art and other works of authorship should be free. These proponents of extensive open source ideals argue that monetary incentive for artists would perhaps better be derived from performances or exhibitions, in a similar fashion to the funding of provision of other types of services.

Case study

An investigation of open source industrial symbiosis is performed by Doyle and Pearce using Google Earth (GE). This paper found that virtual globes coupled with open source waste information can be used to:

# reduce embodied transport energy by reducing distances to recycling facilities, # choose end of life at recycling facilities rather than landfills, and # establish industrial symbiosis and eco-industrial parks on known by-product synergies.

Ultimately, open source sharing of information in virtual globes provide a means to identify economically and environmentally beneficial opportunities for waste management if the data have been made available.

Applications

Many fields of study and social and political views have been affected by the growth of the concept of open source. Advocates in one field often support the expansion of open source in other fields. For example, Linus Torvalds said, "the future is open source everything." But Eric Raymond and other founders of the open source movement have sometimes publicly argued against speculation about applications outside software, saying that strong arguments for software openness should not be weakened by overreaching into areas where the story is less compelling. The broader impacts of the open source movement, and the extent of its role in the development of new information sharing procedures, remains to be seen.

The open source movement has inspired increased transparency and liberty in other fields, including the release of biotechnology research by CAMBIA, Wikipedia, and other projects. The open-source concept has also been applied to media other than computer programs, e.g., by Creative Commons. It also constitutes an example of user innovation (see for example the book Democratizing Innovation). Often, open source is an expression where it simply means that a system is available to all who wish to work on it. The difference between crowdsourcing and open source is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public

Computer software

Open source software is software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies. Examples of open-source software products are:

GNU Project — “a sufficient body of free software”

FreeBSD — operating system derived from Unix

Apache — HTTP web server

Tomcat web server — web container

Drupal — content management system

Eclipse — software development environment comprising an integrated development environment (IDE)

Joomla — content management system

Linux — operating system based on Unix

Mediawiki — wiki server software, the software that runs Wikipedia

MongoDB — document-oriented, non-relational database

Moodle — course management system or virtual learning environment

Mozilla Firefox — web browser

Mozilla Thunderbird — e-mail client

OpenBSD — operating system derived from Unix

OpenOffice.org — office suite

openSIS — open source Student Information System

OpenSolaris — Unix Operating System from Sun Microsystems

osCommerce — ecommerce

PeaZip —

PHP - Scripting language suited for the web

Stockfish — chess engine series, considered to be one of the strongest chess programs of the world

Symbian — real time mobile operating system

TYPO3 — content management system

WordPress — content management system — blog software

7-Zip —

Many, many more

Computer hardware

Open source hardware is hardware whose initial specification, usually in a software format, are published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the hardware and source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source hardware evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual hardware/software developers, hobbyists, as well as very large companies. Examples of open source hardware initiatives are:

Openmoko: a family of open source mobile phones, including the hardware specification and the operating system.

Sun Microsystems's OpenSPARC T1 Multicore processor. Sun has released it under GPL. Arduino, a microcontroller platform for hobbyists, artists and designers. Simputer, an open hardware handheld computer, designed in India for use in environments where computing devices such as personal computers are deemed inappropriate.

Beverages

OpenCola — a cola soft drink, similar to Coca-Cola and Pepsi, whose recipe is open source and developed by volunteers. The taste is said to be comparable to that of the standard beverages. Most corporations producing beverages, hold their formulas as closely guarded secrets. Vores Øl beer — a beer created by students at the IT-University in Copenhagen together with Superflex, a Copenhagen-based artist collective, to illustrate how open source concepts might be applied outside the digital world. In 2002, the beer company Brewtopia in Australia started an open source brewery and invited the general population to be involved in the development and ownership of the brewery, and to vote on the development of every aspect of its beer, Blowfly, and its road to market. In return for their feedback and input, individuals received shares in the company, which is now publicly traded on a stock exchange in Australia. The company has always adhered to its Open Source roots and is the only beer company in the world that allows the public to design, customise and develop its own beers online. Coffee — capsule-based beverage systems such as Nestle's Nespresso or Krups' Tassimo turn home-brewed coffee from an inherently "open-source" beverage into a product limited by the specific range of capsules made available by the system manufacturers.

Digital content

Open-content projects organized by the Wikimedia Foundation — Sites such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary have embraced the open-content GFDL and Creative Commons content licenses. These licenses were designed to adhere to principles similar to various open-source software development licenses. Many of these licenses ensure that content remains free for re-use, that source documents are made readily available to interested parties, and that changes to content are accepted easily back into the system. An important site embracing open source-like ideals is Project Gutenberg, which posts many books on which the copyright has expired and are thus in the Public Domain, ensuring that anyone can use that content for any purpose whatsoever.

Health and science

Medicine Pharmaceuticals — There have been several proposals for open-source pharmaceutical development, which led to the establishment of the Tropical Disease Initiative. There are also a number of not-for-profit "virtual pharmas" such as the Institute for One World Health and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative.

Science Research — The Science Commons was created as an alternative to the expensive legal costs of sharing and reusing scientific works in journals etc.

Research — The Open Source Science Project was created to increase the ability for students to participate in the research process by providing them access to microfunding — which, in turn, offers non-researchers the opportunity to directly invest, and follow, cutting-edge scientific research. All data and methodology is subsequently published in an openly accessible manner under a Creative Commons fair use license.

Other

Open source principles can be applied to technical areas such as digital communication protocols and data storage formats.

* Open design — which involves applying open source methodologies to the design of artifacts and systems in the physical world. Very nascent but has huge potential.

* Open source appropriate technology (OSAT) refers to technologies that are designed in the same fashion as free and open-source software. These technologies must be “appropriate technology” (AT) — meaning technology that is designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social, political, and economical aspects of the community it is intended for.

* Teaching — which involves applying the concepts of open source to instruction using a shared web space as a platform to improve upon learning, organizational, and management challenges. An example of an Open Source Courseware is the Java Education & Development Initiative (JEDI).

* There are few examples of business information (methodologies, advice, guidance, practices) using the open source model, although this is another case where the potential is enormous. ITIL is close to open source. It uses the Cathedral model (no mechanism exists for user contribution) and the content must be bought for a fee that is small by business consulting standards (hundreds of British pounds). Various checklists are published by government, banks or accounting firms. Possibly the only example of free, bazaar-model open source business information is Core Practice.

Society and culture

Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.

The rise of open-source culture in the 20th century resulted from a growing tension between creative practices that involve appropriation, and therefore require access to content that is often copyrighted, and increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws and policies governing access to copyrighted content. The two main ways in which intellectual property laws became more restrictive in the 20th century were extensions to the term of copyright (particularly in the United States) and penalties, such as those articulated in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), placed on attempts to circumvent anti-piracy technologies.

Although artistic appropriation is often permitted under fair use doctrines, the complexity and ambiguity of these doctrines creates an atmosphere of uncertainty among cultural practitioners. Also, the protective actions of copyright owners create what some call a "chilling effect" among cultural practitioners.

In the late 20th century, cultural practitioners began to adopt the intellectual property licensing techniques of free software and open-source software to make their work more freely available to others, including the Creative Commons.

The idea of an "open source" culture runs parallel to "Free Culture," but is substantively different. Free culture is a term derived from the free software movement, and in contrast to that vision of culture, proponents of Open Source Culture (OSC) maintain that some intellectual property law needs to exist to protect cultural producers. Yet they propose a more nuanced position than corporations have traditionally sought. Instead of seeing intellectual property law as an expression of instrumental rules intended to uphold either natural rights or desirable outcomes, an argument for OSC takes into account diverse goods (as in "the Good life") and ends.

One way of achieving the goal of making the fixations of cultural work generally available is to maximally utilize technology and digital media. In keeping with Moore's law's prediction about processors, the cost of digital media and storage plummeted in the late 20th Century. Consequently, the marginal cost of digitally duplicating anything capable of being transmitted via digital media dropped to near zero. Combined with an explosive growth in personal computer and technology ownership, the result is an increase in general population's access to digital media. This phenomenon facilitated growth in open source culture because it allowed for rapid and inexpensive duplication and distribution of culture. Where the access to the majority of culture produced prior to the advent of digital media was limited by other constraints of proprietary and potentially "open" mediums, digital media is the latest technology with the potential to increase access to cultural products. Artists and users who choose to distribute their work digitally face none of the physical limitations that traditional cultural producers have been typically faced with. Accordingly, the audience of an open source culture faces little physical cost in acquiring digital media.

Open source culture precedes Richard Stallman's codification of the concept with the creation of the Free Software Foundation. As the public began to communicate through Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) like FidoNet, places like Sourcery Systems BBS were dedicated to providing source code to Public Domain, Shareware and Freeware programs.

Essentially born out of a desire for increased general access to digital media, the Internet is open source culture's most valuable asset. It is questionable whether the goals of an open source culture could be achieved without the Internet. The global network not only fosters an environment where culture can be generally accessible, but also allows for easy and inexpensive redistribution of culture back into various communities. Some reasons for this are as follows.

First, the Internet allows even greater access to inexpensive digital media and storage. Instead of users being limited to their own facilities and resources, they are granted access to a vast network of facilities and resources, some free. Sites such as Archive.org offer up free web space for anyone willing to license their work under a Creative Commons license. The resulting cultural product is then available to download free (generally accessible) to anyone with an Internet connection.

Second, users are granted unprecedented access to each other. Older analog technologies such as the telephone or television have limitations on the kind of interaction users can have. In the case of television there is little, if any interaction between users participating on the network. And in the case of the telephone, users rarely interact with any more than a couple of their known peers. On the Internet, however, users have the potential to access and meet millions of their peers. This aspect of the Internet facilitates the modification of culture as users are able to collaborate and communicate with each other across international and cultural boundaries. The speed in which digital media travels on the Internet in turn facilitates the redistribution of culture.

Through various technologies such as peer-to-peer networks and blogs, cultural producers can take advantage of vast social networks in order to distribute their products. As opposed to traditional media distribution, redistributing digital media on the Internet can be virtually costless. Technologies such as BitTorrent and Gnutella take advantage of various characteristics of the Internet protocol (TCP/IP) in an attempt to totally decentralize file distribution.

Government

Open politics (sometimes known as Open source politics) — is a term used to describe a political process that uses Internet technologies such as blogs, email and polling to provide for a rapid feedback mechanism between political organizations and their supporters. There is also an alternative conception of the term Open source politics which relates to the development of public policy under a set of rules and processes similar to the Open Source Software movement.

Open source governance — is similar to open source politics, but it applies more to the democratic process and promotes the freedom of information.

Ethics

Open Source ethics is split into two strands: Open Source Ethics as an Ethical School — Charles Ess and David Berry are researching whether ethics can learn anything from an open source approach. Ess famously even defined the AoIR Research Guidelines as an example of open source ethics. Open Source Ethics as a Professional Body of Rules — This is based principally on the computer ethics school, studying the questions of ethics and professionalism in the computer industry in general and software development in particular.

Media

Open source journalism — referred to the standard journalistic techniques of news gathering and fact checking, and reflected a similar term that was in use from 1992 in military intelligence circles, open source intelligence. It is now commonly used to describe forms of innovative publishing of online journalism, rather than the sourcing of news stories by a professional journalist. In the December 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine this is referred to as user created content and listed alongside more traditional open source projects such as OpenSolaris and Linux.

Weblogs, or blogs, are another significant platform for open source culture. Blogs consist of periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts, using a technology that makes webpages easily updatable with no understanding of design, code, or file transfer required. While corporations, political campaigns and other formal institutions have begun using these tools to distribute information, many blogs are used by individuals for personal expression, political organizing, and socializing. Some, such as LiveJournal or WordPress, utilize open source software that is open to the public and can be modified by users to fit their own tastes. Whether the code is open or not, this format represents a nimble tool for people to borrow and re-present culture; whereas traditional websites made the illegal reproduction of culture difficult to regulate, the mutability of blogs makes "open sourcing" even more uncontrollable since it allows a larger portion of the population to replicate material more quickly in the public sphere.

Messageboards are another platform for open source culture. Messageboards (also known as discussion boards or forums), are places online where people with similar interests can congregate and post messages for the community to read and respond to. Messageboards sometimes have moderators who enforce community standards of etiquette such as banning users who are spammers. Other common board features are private messages (where users can send messages to one another) as well as chat (a way to have a real time conversation online) and image uploading. Some messageboards use phpBB, which is a free open source package. Where blogs are more about individual expression and tend to revolve around their authors, messageboards are about creating a conversation amongst its users where information can be shared freely and quickly. Messageboards are a way to remove intermediaries from everyday life — for instance, instead of relying on commercials and other forms of advertising, one can ask other users for frank reviews of a product, movie or CD. By removing the cultural middlemen, messageboards help speed the flow of information and exchange of ideas.

OpenDocument is an open document file format for saving and exchanging editable office documents such as text documents (including memos, reports, and books), spreadsheets, charts, and presentations. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format such as OpenDocument avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business, raises their prices, changes their software, or changes their licensing terms to something less favorable.

Open source movie production is either an open call system in which a changing crew and cast collaborate in movie production, a system in which the end result is made available for re-use by others or in which exclusively open source products are used in the production. The 2006 movie Elephants Dream is said to be the "world's first open movie", created entirely using open source technology.

An open source documentary film has a production process allowing the open contributions of archival material, footage, and other filmic elements, both in unedited and edited form. By doing so, on-line contributors become part of the process of creating the film, helping to influence the editorial and visual material to be used in the documentary, as well as its thematic development. The first open source documentary film to go into production "The American Revolution"," which will examine the role that WBCN-FM in Boston played in the cultural, social and political changes locally and nationally from 1968 to 1974, is being produced by Lichtenstein Creative Media and the non-profit The Fund for Independent Media. Open Source Cinema is a website to create Basement Tapes, a feature documentary about copyright in the digital age, co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Open Source Filmmaking refers to a form of filmmaking that takes a method of idea formation from open source software, but in this case the 'source' for a film maker is raw unedited footage rather than programming code. It can also refer to a method of filmmaking where the process of creation is 'open' i.e. a disparate group of contributors, at different times contribute to the final piece.

Open-IPTV is IPTV that is not limited to one recording studio, production studio, or cast. Open-IPTV uses the Internet or other means to pool efforts and resources together to create an online community that all contributes to a show.

Education

Within the academic community, there is discussion about expanding what could be called the "intellectual commons" (analogous to the Creative Commons). Proponents of this view have hailed the Connexions Project at Rice University, OpenCourseWare project at MIT, Eugene Thacker's article on "Open Source DNA", the "Open Source Cultural Database" and Wikipedia as examples of applying open source outside the realm of computer software.

Open source curricula are instructional resources whose digital source can be freely used, distributed and modified.

Another strand to the academic community is in the area of research. Many funded research projects produce software as part of their work. There is an increasing interest in making the outputs of such projects available under an open source license. In the UK the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has developed a policy on open source software. JISC also funds a development service called OSS Watch which acts as an advisory service for higher and further education institutions wishing to use, contribute to and develop open source software.

Innovation communities

The principle of sharing predates the open source movement; for example, the free sharing of information has been institutionalized in the scientific enterprise since at least the 19th century. Open source principles have always been part of the scientific community. The sociologist Robert K. Merton described the four basic elements of the community — universalism (an international perspective), communism (sharing information), disinterestedness (removing one's personal views from the scientific inquiry) and organized skepticism (requirements of proof and review) that accurately describe the scientific community today. These principles are, in part, complemented by US law's focus on protecting expression and method but not the ideas themselves. There is also a tradition of publishing research results to the scientific community instead of keeping all such knowledge proprietary. One of the recent initiatives in scientific publishing has been open access — the idea that research should be published in such a way that it is free and available to the public. There are currently many open access journals where the information is available free online, however most journals do charge a fee (either to users or libraries for access). The Budapest Open Access Initiative is an international effort with the goal of making all research articles available free on the Internet. The National Institutes of Health has recently proposed a policy on "Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information." This policy would provide a free, searchable resource of NIH-funded results to the public and with other international repositories six months after its initial publication. The NIH's move is an important one because there is significant amount of public funding in scientific research. Many of the questions have yet to be answered — the balancing of profit vs. public access, and ensuring that desirable standards and incentives do not diminish with a shift to open access.

Farmavita.Net — Community of Pharmaceuticals Executives have recently proposed new business model of Open Source Pharmaceuticals. The project is targeted to development and sharing of know-how for manufacture of essential and life saving medicines. It is mainly dedicated to the countries with less developed economies where local pharmaceutical research and development resources are insufficient for national needs. It will be limited to generic (off-patent) medicines with established use. By the definition, medicinal product have a “well-established use” if is used for at least 15 years, with recognized efficacy and an acceptable level of safety. In that event, the expensive clinical test and trial results could be replaced by appropriate scientific literature.

Benjamin Franklin was an early contributor eventually donating all his inventions including the Franklin stove, bifocals and the lightning rod to the public domain.

New NGO communities are starting to use the open source technology as a tool. One example is the Open Source Youth Network started in 2007 in Lisboa by ISCA members.

Open innovation is also a new emerging concept which advocate putting R&D; in a common pool. The Eclipse platform is openly presenting itself as an Open innovation network.

Arts and recreation

Copyright protection is used in the performing arts and even in athletic activities. Some groups have attempted to remove copyright from such practices.

References

Literature on legal and economic aspects

François Letellier (2008), Open Source Software: the Role of Nonprofits in Federating Business and Innovation Ecosystems, AFME 2008 (in Adobe pdf format).

Benkler, Y. (2002): “Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm." Yale Law Journal 112.3 (Dec 2002): p367(78) (in Adobe pdf format)

Berry, D. M & Moss, G. (2008). Libre Culture: Meditations on Free Culture. Canada: Pygmalion Books. (in Adobe pdf format)

Bitzer, J. & Schröder, P. J.H. (2005): "The Impact of Entry and Competition by Open Source Software on Innovation Activity", Industrial Organization 0512001, EconWPA. (in Adobe Systems pdf format)

v. Engelhardt, S. (2008): "The Economic Properties of Software", Jena Economic Research Papers, Volume 2 (2008), Number 2008-045. (in Adobe pdf format)

v. Engelhardt, S. (2008): "Intellectual Property Rights and Ex-Post Transaction Costs: the Case of Open and Closed Source Software", Jena Economic Research Papers 2008-047. (in Adobe pdf format)

v. Engelhardt, S. & Swaminathan, S. (2008): "Open Source Software, Closed Source Software or Both: Impacts on Industry Growth and the Role of Intellectual Property Rights", Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 799. (in Adobe Systems pdf format)

Feller, J., Fitzgerald, B. & Hissam, S. A. (eds), (2005): Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, MIT Press.

Ghosh, R. A. (2006): Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU

v. Hippel, E. & v. Krogh, G. (2003): ‘Open source software and the "private-collective" innovation model: Issues for organization science’, Organization Science 14(2), 209–223.

Lerner J. & Pathak P. A. & Tirole, J. (2006): "The Dynamics of Open Source Contributors", American Economic Review, vol. 96 (2), p. 114-118.

Lerner, J. & Tirole, J. (2002): ‘Some simple economics on open source’, Journal of Industrial Economics 50(2), p 197–234. Download of an earlier version.

Lerner, J. & Tirole, J. (2005): "The Scope of Open Source Licensing", The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, vol. 21, p. 20-56.

Lerner, J. & Tirole, J. (2005): "The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond", Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 19(2), p. 99-120.

Maurer, S. M. (2008): ‘Open source biology: Finding a niche (or maybe several)’, UMKC Law Review 76(2). (download an online version) (in Adobe pdf format)

Osterloh, M. & Rota, S. (2007): "Open source software development--Just another case of collective invention?", Research Policy, vol. 36(2), pages 157-171. Download of an earlier version

Riehle, D. (2007): "The Economic Motivation of Open Source: Stakeholder Perspectives", IEEE Computer, vol. 40, no. 4 (April 2007), p. 25-32.

Rossi, M. A. (2006): Decoding the free/open source software puzzle: A survey of theoretical and empirical contributions, in J. Bitzer P. Schröder, eds, ‘The Economics of Open Source Software Development’, p 15–55. (download an online version) (in Adobe pdf format)

Schiff, A. (2002): "The Economics of Open Source Software: A Survey of the Early Literature," Review of Network Economics, vol. 1(1), p 66-74.

Schwarz, M. & Takhteyev, Y. (2010): "Half a Century of Public Software Institutions: Open Source as a Solution to the Hold-Up Problem", Journal of Public Economic Theory, vol. 12 (4), p. 609–639. Download of an earlier version.

External links

An open-source shot in the arm? The Economist, Jun 10th 2004,

SDForum Distinguished Speaker talks on Open Source Software by Guido van Rossum, Howard Rheingold, and Bruce Perens, 2005.

SDForum Global Open Source, March 24, 2008

Machine Learning Open Source Software

Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards

QualiPSo European Initiative

International Institute for Software Technology / United Nations University

UNU/IIST Open Source Software Certification

Calls for open source government

Open Source Open World — Open Standards Throughout the Globe

How to Contribute to Open Source Without Coding

Category:Computer law Category:Intellectual property law Category:Free software culture and documents Category:Social information processing Category:Standards

This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.

Email this Page

Go Open Source or Go Home

Duration: 4:55
Published: 2009-10-10
Uploaded: 2010-11-24
Author: NixiePixel

www.twitter.com You don't have to be a geek to want to save your money and download programs for free. Here are 5 of my quick picks for open source software. My site - www.nixiepixel.com You may be wondering; What is Open Source? Open source generally refers to software that is released with open source code and no restrictions on downloading, modifying or advertising the work. An open source program usually starts when developers publish their code where other developers can learn about it, download it, and play with it. Where do you come in? You can reap all the benefits of course by using the application for no cost to you. Here is where you can download the programs mentioned in the video (in order) Firefox: www.mozilla.com OpenOffice: www.openoffice.org GIMP: www.gimp.org Pidgin: www.pidgin.im Video Editing Software: KDenLive: www.kdenlive.org (for Linux) Avidemux: fixounet.free.fr (for Windows) Thanks and hope you enjoyed! Music: "Blondie" by Speedsound www.jamendo.com (used with CCL 3.0)

Opensource & Free Software

Duration: 16:56
Published: 2010-02-02
Uploaded: 2010-10-08
Author: mrbit10

A bit on Opensource, Free Software, Freeware some links www.softwarefreedom.org www.fsf.org www.microsoft.com www.opensource.apple.com www.gnu.org

Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics

Duration: 17:53
Published: 2008-04-21
Uploaded: 2010-11-24
Author: TEDtalksDirector

www.ted.com Law professor Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they're paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants.

Android Open Source Project

Duration: 4:27
Published: 2008-10-20
Uploaded: 2010-11-20
Author: androiddevelopers

An introduction to Android Open Source Project. Android is the first free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform. Android offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile applications. It also contains a rich set of APIs that allows third-party developers to develop great applications. Learn more at source.android.com.

Richard stallman speaking abouth opensource

Duration: 3:41
Published: 2007-11-04
Uploaded: 2010-11-16
Author: darkapitude

Richard Stallman is a notable programmer whose major accomplishments include GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. GNU ? In 1985, he published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU. www.go-opensource.org creative commons by-nc-sa 2.5

Obama: Open Source President?

Duration: 1:25
Published: 2008-11-05
Uploaded: 2010-11-02
Author: sachmet251

Alex Castellanos talks on CNN at 12:10 AM CT Nov. 5, 2008 about Obama's campaign and compares it to the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Open Source in general.

Google I/O 2008 - Open Source Projects and Poisonous People

Duration: 57:45
Published: 2008-06-10
Uploaded: 2010-11-24
Author: GoogleDevelopers

How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman (Google) Every project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful. These people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. Come learn how to identify these people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail your project. Told through a series of (often amusing) real-life anecdotes and experiences.

Open Source 3-D Printer Turns Designs Into Objects

Duration: 2:14
Published: 2010-01-09
Uploaded: 2010-11-25
Author: wired

Wired.com checks out MakerBot's Cupcake CNC 3-D Printer. Using PLA, ABS, or HDPE plastic, this open source, $950 kit allows the user to fabricate small objects of virtually any shape.

V8: an open source JavaScript engine

Duration: 5:21
Published: 2008-09-15
Uploaded: 2010-11-24
Author: Google

Google engineer, Lars Bak, explains the key engineering decisions behind, V8, the JavaScript virtual machine used in Google Chrome.

Kinect open source driver demo

Duration: 1:13
Published: 2010-11-10
Uploaded: 2010-11-25
Author: marcan42

I just got this to work: a fully open source Kinect driver supporting the depth and RGB cameras. Code here: git.marcansoft.com

Multi-touch Screens in the Open Source World

Duration: 72:42
Published: 2008-06-10
Uploaded: 2010-11-11
Author: GoogleTechTalks

Google Tech Talks June 9, 2008 ABSTRACT Multi-touch is a new way of human computer interaction, which recognizes multiple simultaneous touch points, as opposed to the standard touchscreen, which recognizes only one touch point at a time. There are many forms of natural input in order to simplify the way people interact with their PC's and devices, however with the introduction of Apple iPhone/iPod Touch, Microsoft Surface and other devices, multi-touch is becoming more and more popular. In this tech talk I will describe what is the history behind multi-touch screens, what kind of multi-touch devices are available and how do they work, focusing mostly on FTIR and DI technique. We will discuss how to receive multi-touch events in our applications using TUIO protocol and how to write multi-touch applications using just a simulator. We will look into available open source projects that can be used to operate multi-touch screens and that are being developed by Natural User Interface Group (NUI Group) community. Speaker: Pawel Solyga Pawel Solyga is a computer science student at Politechnika Wroclawska, Poland. He is a co-founder of Natural User Interface Group (NUI Group), whose main areas of interest are modern user interfaces and in particular mutli-touch sreens. Pawel is also a former Google Summer of Code student. For GSoC 2008, he's working as organization administrator and mentor for the NUI Group. When not contributing to Open Source projects, he's a software engineer <b>...</b>

RabbitMQ: An Open Source Messaging Broker That Just Works

Duration: 55:21
Published: 2008-10-13
Uploaded: 2010-09-13
Author: GoogleTechTalks

Google Tech Talks September 25, 2008 ABSTRACT RabbitMQ implements AMQP, the emerging standard internet protocol for business messaging. It also support numerous bridges to other messaging and internet protocols so is highly adaptable to many use cases. The core server is implemented in Erlang which is well known for delivering a highly scalable and stable environment for applications that involve messaging. When JP Morgan Chase introduced AMQP, Erlang seemed an obvious implementation choice. This talk will explain the rationale of this decision in detail and describe the technology and architecture of the server. Today RabbitMQ is used in solutions across multiple platforms and client languages such as Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Python and Erlang. Come to this talk if you want to hear about: -Why did we choose Erlang? -How is RabbitMQ implemented? -Who uses RabbitMQ and why? -What will future designs do differently based on experiences in building and maintaining RabbitMQ? -How does the AMQP wire protocol compare to Protocol Buffers and RPC mechanisms in terms of latency, efficiency and scalability? -How does AMQP compare to XMPP? -How does the XMPP over AMQP bridge work and how are we using it for federated, open microblogging? Speaker: Alexis Richardson, Matthias Radestock, Tony Garnock-Jones, Ben Hood

opengazer: open-source gaze tracking

Duration: 1:16
Published: 2007-01-19
Uploaded: 2010-11-04
Author: zielaj

Opengazer is an open-source application that uses an ordinary webcam to track your gaze focus. www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk

Open Source Questions and Answers

Duration: 17:45
Published: 2008-01-01
Uploaded: 2010-09-15
Author: lockergnome

live.pirillo.com - John Perez is a college Freshman who is doing an argumentative paper on Open-Source applications. He sent me a list of ten questions that I am going to answer in simple terms. Also, we're using our GoToMeeting to allow you to follow along with everyone as they use Open-Source applications.

Sintel - Third Open Movie by Blender Foundation

Duration: 14:48
Published: 2010-09-30
Uploaded: 2010-11-25
Author: BlenderFoundation

"Sintel" is an independently produced short film, initiated by the Blender Foundation as a means to further improve and validate the free/open source 3D creation suite Blender. With initial funding provided by 1000s of donations via the internet community, it has again proven to be a viable development model for both open 3D technology as for independent animation film. This 15 minute film has been realized in the studio of the Amsterdam Blender Institute, by an international team of artists and developers. In addition to that, several crucial technical and creative targets have been realized online, by developers and artists and teams all over the world. www.sintel.org

Open Source Developers at Google: Amit Singh on MacFuse

Duration: 84:13
Published: 2007-05-31
Uploaded: 2010-11-25
Author: Google

File systems provide one of the most familiar interfaces end users know. Since implementing a traditional file system is extremely complex and difficult, presenting information seamlessly through files and folders has typically been limited to a small set of select programmers--often kernel hackers who develop at the lowest layers of a system. The MacFUSE mechanism breaks this barrier on Mac OS X by doing all the in-kernel hard work once and for all and leaving to the developer only the file-system-specific logic, which can be implemented as a regular user-space application. MacFUSE, with its simple programmer-visible API (same as the Linux FUSE API) and multiple language bindings, almost trivializes the process of making anything and everything appear seamlessly as a set of files and folders. You can use it to blur the line between the Macintosh Desktop and the Web. In this talk, you will hear the story of MacFUSE from its creator.

Cameron Sinclair: TED Prize wish: Open-source architecture to house the world

Duration: 24:14
Published: 2007-01-16
Uploaded: 2010-11-17
Author: TEDtalksDirector

www.ted.com Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. He unveils his TED Prize wish for a network to improve global living standards through collaborative design.TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http

[GUADEC2010] Neelie Kroes on open source and the importance of communities

Duration: 4:23
Published: 2010-07-12
Uploaded: 2010-11-12
Author: GUADEC

This video message from Neelie Kroes was recorded in a request to support the GNOME Community, GUADEC 2010 and The GNOME Open Desktop Day. The European Commissioner for Digital Agenda and Vice-President of the European Commission reflects on the growing acceptance of open source and emphasises the importance of communities in shaping the digital future.

The Truth about Open Source

Duration: 1:24
Published: 2006-02-23
Uploaded: 2010-11-24
Author: ashens

An ironic look at commercial attitudes to Open SOurce software.

Does Microsoft Support Open Source Software?

Duration: 4:15
Published: 2010-10-04
Uploaded: 2010-11-04
Author: lockergnome

twitter.com - facebook.com - Josh represented Microsoft during OpenCamp recently. People were quite confused as to why Microsoft would be interested in Open Source products. While Windows and Linux may be competitors, much of the Open Source applications are not. They run really well in Windows. chris.pirillo.com

Linux and opensource special part 1

Duration: 7:25
Published: 2007-06-17
Uploaded: 2010-09-07
Author: medarklord

discussion about opensource , ubuntu , openoffice , Mark shuttleworth interview and more.. this is part 1 of 2 bbc click tech show

Scaling Facebook with OpenSource tools

Duration: 51:23
Published: 2010-02-14
Uploaded: 2010-11-07
Author: fosdemtalks

By David Recordon This talk will give you a better idea of what it takes to scale Facebook. From the day that Mark Zuckerberg started building Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004 to today, the site has been built on common open source software such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Today Facebook reaches over 350 million people per month, is the largest PHP site in the World, and has released major pieces of our infrastructure as open source. It's not possible to scale a site like Facebook simply by sharding your databases, rather we've developed and contributed to a series of open source infrastructure technologies. Some of these projects include Cassandra, Hive, Haystack, memcached, and Scribe, where each focuses on solving a specific problem with Thrift allowing them to communicate across languages. This talk will give you a better idea of what it takes to scale Facebook, a look into the infrastructure we use to do so, and dive into performance work we're focused on in order to scale PHP to over 350 billion page views per month.FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Development European Meeting) is a European event centered around Free and Open Source software development. It is aimed at developers and all interested in the Free and Open Source news in the world. Its goals are to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open source software. More info at fosdem.org

reddit goes open source: message from the alien mascot

Duration: 1:48
Published: 2008-06-18
Uploaded: 2010-11-19
Author: kn0thing

reddit.com went open source on June 17th and the alien was asked -- no, told -- to put this video together to explain it. alexis ohanian (kn0thing.com) was aided by iMovieHD and justin kan (justin.tv) who provided the excellent voice-acting he's famous for.

Matt Mullenweg - Open source as a philosophy

Duration: 3:22
Published: 2009-07-13
Uploaded: 2010-09-12
Author: amicalmant

Matt Mullenweg, founder and lead developer of the Wordpress publishing platform, explains how the open source philosophy and "Golden Rule" apply not only to technology -- but to such fields as politics, economics and environment. Recorded at Wordcamp Montreal 2009 by Christian Aubry. Licence: Creative Commons BY-SA.

thumbnails

list

Play next
Play all
clear
Autoplay
Autorepeat
Shuffle

Go Open Source or Go Home