News.Com Defending the use of open source

"A new report reveals just how much the U.S. Department of Defense depends on open-source software and recommends steps to ensure that open source is recognized and accepted."

"The report published Monday found that what it calls free and open-source software (FOSS) "plays a more critical role in the (Defense Department) than has been generally recognized." The report also noted that if open source were banned, the department's security would plummet and costs would rise sharply."

redux [07.31.02]
News.Com Free speech, free beer and free software

"The experience of Sun and others is that open source provides ideal development and business models for today's Net Effect economy. It's not about free stuff; it's about enfranchising every user and development community member. Today's software innovations need this model more than ever before. With an open foundation, companies can gain their just compensation for their innovations "above the line," but the subtle lock-in offered by our traditional understanding of "standards" is largely avoided.

Most importantly, open source is not just about code; it is about community. You don't make a project open source just with a license. It takes the costly and time-consuming birthing of a community of code, a trusted gatekeeper function and a series of symbiotic commercial enterprises to make true open source. 21st century open source is not free."

redux [07.31.02]
Salon Same job. Different cubicle

""The way a lot of people see it is we were doing open-source before [VA Linux] and we've continued doing open source after VA Linux for the exact same reason: because we love to do it," Jennings says. "It was nice to get paid for it, but getting paid was always viewed as kind of a perk."

That many ex-VA Linux employees still get to hack for pay is probably the top reason so few complain when it comes to the former company. As the old high-tech saying goes, it's the pioneers who usually end up with the most arrows in their backs."

redux [05.17.02]
BusinessWeek Giant Steps for a Software Upstart

"A lot has changed for Linux in the past two years. True, the basic tenets of the rebellious open-source software-development movement popularized by coder Linus Torvalds remain largely intact. Loosely organized collectives, often from competing companies, collaborate to build software products that no one owns, with source code that anyone can view and alter. Any changes in the code are held by the community at large.

While such idealism worked fine in academia and among uber-geeks, it wasn't immune to market economics as the movement matured."

redux [12.09.01]
First Monday Code, Culture and Cash: The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development

"The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about "hacker ethics" and "post-scarcity" gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them."

redux [11.21.00]
News.Com Open-source approach fades in tough times

"The ideological purity of the open-source software business is being diluted by a new era of pragmatism as start-ups adjust to the economic slump."

"Where is our business model if everyone else can copy it?" asked Holger Dyroff, former CEO and now director of sales for Linux software seller SuSE. "The question is where we can make money now. Nobody cared about profitability two years ago."

"The new thinking often involves a proprietary product that has been built on top of an open-source foundation--a situation that could be considered the best, or worst, of both worlds."

winterspeak.com Interview with Sleepycat President and CEO, Michael Olson

"How to make money with the GPL. How to promote and spread free software. How open source's experience advantage with developers gives companies a competitive edge. Sleepycat President and CEO Michael Olson shows us what happens when free software meets intelligent business strategy."

Eric S. Raymond The Magic Cauldron

"This paper analyzes the evolving economic substrate of the open-source phenomenon. We first explode some prevalent myths about the funding of program development and the price structure of software. We present a game-theory analysis of the stability of open-source cooperation. We present nine models for sustainable funding of open-source development; two non-profit, seven for-profit. We continue to develop a qualitative theory of when it is economically rational to be closed. We then examine some novel additional mechanisms the market is now inventing to fund for-profit open-source development, including the reinvention of the patronage system and task markets. We conclude with some tentative predictions of the future."