The Economist Out in the open
"Open-source is extremely good at optimising existing programs, says Ray Ozzie, chief executive of Groove Networks and creator of the popular Lotus Notes. But he cannot imagine his firm’s software, which allows small groups of people to collaborate online, being developed in a decentralised way. He and four colleagues operated “like one brain” for three years to solve all the engineering problems, he says.

Still, nobody can predict what kind of “mob software” may turn up. Richard Gabriel, a distinguished engineer at Sun, describes this as “a kind of semi-chaotic, self-organising behaviour in which numerous small acts of repair can lead to quickly built, complex and massive creations”. Open-source is certainly a mass phenomenon, with tens of thousands of volunteer programmers across the world already taking part, and more joining in all the time, particularly in countries such as China and India."

redux [04.01.01]
Knowledge@Wharton Why Global Software Development Unleashes Innovation
"Metiu and Kogut see the open source movement as a tremendous driver of innovation. "The open development model opens up the ability to contribute to innovation," they say. "It recognizes that the distribution of natural intelligence does not correspond to the monopolization of innovation by the richest firms or richest countries. It is this gap between the distribution of ability and the distribution of opportunity that the web will force companies to recognize and to realign their development strategies." In other words, engineers in China, Israel or India who are unable or unwilling to move to Silicon Valley or the Research Triangle need not be locked out of innovative product development: They can play a vital role in the creation of new products and services."

Guardian Unlimited Second sight
"It is a bracingly cool wind that rushes through the streets of Helsinki in mid-March. And not only does it chill you to the bone, it blows through your mind too.

Imagine a society where the computer hacker isn't a figure of fear or derision, but something of a national hero (Linus Torvalds). Imagine a country where the leading thinkers and policy-makers are comfortable with the idea of "open source" - not just as software, but as a model for education, social services, even democracy itself. As a technoculture, Finland is much more than the might of Nokia and its latest stockmarket valuations. The higher values of the net - participation, sharing of resources, love of knowledge - seem deeply hard-wired into this culture."

redux [04.20.00]
The New York Times Open-Source Software Arouses Researchers' Curiosity
[requires 'free' registration]
"WHEN technology stocks took their sharp tumble last week, many companies appeared to lose one of their most important assets -- the ability to lure talented employees with options. To attract and hold the best, you have to offer the chance to strike it rich.

Or do you? What are we to think when the best of the best -- the elite programmers that industry wisdom deems 100 times more productive than the typical competent coder -- donate their precious time to develop software anyone can use without charge? That is the puzzle the open-source movement, most famous for the Linux operating system, presents to economists."

"While its development looks like a marketplace, open-source software itself is a classic public good. You can use it without contributing to its maintenance and without paying a cent to all those programmers who created and improved it.

Hence the economic puzzle. As Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School and Jean Tirole of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ask in a recent paper: "Why should thousands of top-notch programmers contribute freely to the provision of a public good?"

Salon Finland -- The Open Source Society
"Why Finland? In the 21st century, there's hardly a nation in the world that doesn't want to be a role model for the information society. What made Finland so special? Was it an accident of history, the luck of the draw, or some more complex intersection of cultural evolution and the activist will of an entire people? More to the point, was it possible that the deep structure of Finnish civilization encourages an open-source way of life?"

redux [01.08.01]
First Monday Internet, Innovation, and Open Source: Actors in the Network
"This paper describes the evolution of the Linux operating system, and studies dynamics of socio-technical change using Linux as a case example. Theoretical models of community-based practice and learning are combined with actor-network theory, and the characteristics of the open source development model are described using the introduced theoretical concepts. The paper analyses the growth and development of Linux and its development community, and shows how the development community evolves into an ecology of community-centered practices."

strategy+business Open for Business
"A marketplace of ideas is not inherently in conflict with a community of ideas. Then again, those tensions and conflicts that do exist can and will lead to further innovations.

What all of these books do well is capture the grand themes and the subtle nuances that explain why it makes more sense to have an untraditional community drive innovation than to have a traditional marketplace do so. The point of these books is that communities of people can come up with codes of conduct — rules of engagement — about how ideas can and should be shared.

The software that really matters is not what is programmed in computer code but rather the shared assumptions and ideals that let people exchange ideas. That ultimately is what will shape the global ecology of innovation."