In production and development, open source is a philosophy,^{[not in citation given][not in citation given]} or pragmatic methodology^{[not in citation given]} that promotes free redistribution and access to an end product's design and implementation details. Before the phrase 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.^{[citation needed]} Opening the source code enabled a self-enhancing diversity of production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. The open-source software movement was born to describe the environment that the new copyright, licensing, domain, and consumer issues created.^{[citation needed]}

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.

Yochai Benkler is an Israeli-American professor of Law and author. Since 2007, he has been the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

In 1984, Benkler was the treasurer of Kibbutz Shizafon. He received his LL.B. from Tel-Aviv University in 1991 and J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1994. He worked at the law firm Ropes & Gray from 1994-1995. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer from 1995 to 1996.

He was a professor at New York University School of Law from 1996 to 2003, and visited at Yale Law School and Harvard Law School (during 2002-2003), before joining the Yale Law School faculty in 2003. In 2007, Benkler joined Harvard Law School, where he teaches and is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Benkler is on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. In 2011, his research led him to receive the $100,000 Ford Foundation Social Change Visionaries Award.

Michael Tiemann is Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, and former President of the Open Source Initiative. He previously was the Chief Technical Officer of Red Hat. He serves on a number of boards, including the Embedded Linux Consortium, the XMPP Technical Advisory Board, the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board, the Sahana Board and the Board of Directors of ActiveState Tool Corp.

He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. His programming contributions to free software include authorship of the GNU C++ compiler and work on the GNU C compiler and the GNU Debugger. Tiemann is featured in the 2001 documentary Revolution OS.

He earned a bachelor's degree from the Moore School of Engineering in 1986 at the University of Pennsylvania.

Richard G. Baraniuk is the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University.

Dr. Baraniuk received a B.Sc. from the University of Manitoba in 1987 and a M.Sc. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992 under the supervision of Douglas L. Jones. After spending 1992-1993 at École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, he joined Rice University.

Baraniuk has been active in the development of digital signal processing and image processing systems, with numerous contributions to the theory of wavelets and compressive sensing. His work with Kevin Kelly on the Rice "single-pixel camera" applied the ideas of compressive sensing to design a novel imaging system that was selected by Technology Review Magazine as a TR10 Top 10 Emerging Technology in 2007.

Baraniuk is a founder and leader of the open education movement, which aims to share knowledge and teaching materials freely over the internet. In 1999, Baraniuk launched Connexions, one of the first initiatives to offer free, open source textbooks via the web. Connexions continues to be one of the largest and most used open education platforms worldwide.