The Promise of Software Libre
A webliography
An earlier version of this reading list appeared in Library Juice 5:2, January 10, 2002.
The Free Software Movement presents a popular and growing ethic of sharing and cooperation, and against the traditional assumptions of intellectual property, among computer programmers and other dealing with digital products.
"Software Libre" is a name that some people have started using for the Free Software Movement in order to clarify that the "Free" in "Free Software" has the meaning of "Libre" rather than "Gratis." (Readings in the list below will clarify this distinction.)
"Open Source" is a relatively newer term, denoting a particular organization's effort to market software libre and to define it in a more specific way that is friendlier to the capitalist marketplace (in my limited understanding of the subject).
Here is the idea behind the following reading list: Software Libre and 21st Century Librarianship, via their economic practices relative to technology and "content" respectively, constitute an information age political economic movement combining the best of both libertarianism (in the broadest sense, not referring to a privileging of property rights) and socialism.
Software Libre is something librarians should think about who want to build on a vision of the "big picture" of 21st Century librarianship and potential social/cultural developments in the broader sense.
I invite additions to this list, including expansions into related areas.
Rory Litwin
Philosophy of the GNU Project
http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/philosophy.html
By Eric Steven Raymond:
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
"This paper influenced Netscape's decision to release Communicator 5.0 in
source, and there are hopeful signs that it may be launching a long-overdue
reliability revolution in the software industry."http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
Homesteading the Noosphere
"In this paper, I examine in detail the property and ownership customs of
the open-source culture. Yes, it does have property customs -- and rather
elaborate ones too, which reveal an underlying gift culture in which
hackers compete amicably for peer repute. This analysis has large
implications for anyone interested in organizing large-scale intellectual
collaborations."http://catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/
The Magic Cauldron.
"This paper analyzes the economics of open-source software. It includes
some explosion of common myths about software production economics, a
game-theoretical account of why open-source cooperation is stable, and a
taxonomy of open-source business models."http://catb.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron.html
A Second Look at the Cathedral and Bazaar
Another critical review of Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_12/bezroukov/index.html
O'Reilly 2001 Open Source Convention - Proceedings and Coverage
http://www.oreillynet.com/oscon2001/
THE POWER OF OPENNESS
Why Citizens, Education, Government and Business
Should Care About the Coming Revolution
in Open Source Code SoftwareA Critique and a Proposal
for The H20 ProjectBy David Bollier
Berkman Center for Internet and Societyhttp://h2oproject.law.harvard.edu/opencode/h2o/
Netscape Communicator Open Source Code White Paper
"This paper discusses Netscape's new open source development strategy;
provides examples of successful open source projects; describes how
Netscape plans to use this model to deliver high-quality, branded versions;
and reveals how developers, enterprise customers, and consumers ultimately
benefit from this new strategy, which is now an integral part of Netscape's
client product development."http://home.netscape.com/browsers/future/whitepaper.html
Articles on Open Source in Salon:
Apache's free-software warriors
By Andrew Leonard
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1997/11/cov_20feature.htmlThe little operating system that could
By Andrew Leonard
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/06/cov_26feature.htmlLet my software go!
By Andrew Leonard
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/04/cov_14feature.htmlThe saint of free software (About Richard Stallman)
By Andrew Leonard
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/08/cov_31feature.htmlResponse to the Above by Eric Raymond and others:
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/09/11feature.htmlMicrosoft's Halloween scare (claiming Open Source a great threat)
By Scott Rosenberg
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/rose/1998/11/04straight.htmlMartin Luther, meet Linus Torvalds
By Thomas Scoville
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/1998/11/12feature.htmlFree the Windows source code?
By Scott Rosenberg
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/rose/1998/04/22straight.htmlReaders respond to the above:
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/rose/1998/05/27straight.html
The Halloween documents: Full text of the Microsoft memos on Linux and the
open-source challenge to the company's dominance.http://www.opensource.org/halloween/
Open Source Software: Free Provision of a Complex Public Good
By Jim Bessen
"Open source software, developed by volunteers, appears counter to
conventional wisdom about private provision of public goods. Standard
theory holds that without property rights, free-riding inhibits private
investment in public goods such as information and software. But complex
open source products challenge commercially-developed software in quality
and market share. I argue that the complexity of software changes the
results. For complex goods under asymmetric information, open source
developers self-select, offsetting free-riding losses. But commercial firms
lack information necessary for effective provision. I compare different
forms of provision and different property rights. Strong property rights
can limit provision of complex public goods."http://www.researchoninnovation.org/opensrc.pdf
'Libre' Software: Turning Fads Into Institutions
By Jean Michael Dalle and Nicolas Jullien
"This paper presents an economic analysis of Libre software and of its
sustainability as an economic model. We underline the role of Libre
software development communities and analyze incentives of both kernel and
obscure developers. We especially emphasize the role of the so-called
'public' licenses to provide an appropriate institutional framework."http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/Libre-Software.pdf
Internet Innovation and Open Source: Actors in the Network
Ilkka Tuomi
"The paper analyzes the growth and development of the Linux community and
demonstrates how it evolves into an ecology of community-centered
practices."http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/Ilkka Tuomi - Actors in the Network.pdf
(Yes, this URL really has spaces in it.)
The Political Economy of Open Source
Steven Weber
"The paper describes the open source process and characterizes more fully
the economic, technological, and social systems that together constitute
this distinct mode of production. The paper explains the open source
process, by answering three questions about individual motivations,
coordination, and complexity using a compoud argument of microfoundations,
economic logic, and social/political structure."http://e-conomy.berkeley.edu/publications/wp/wp140.pdf
Copyleft vs. Copyright: A Marxist Critique
by Johan Soderberg
"Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance to
that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose
capitalism. Thus, Marxism is a natural starting point when challenging
copyright. Marx's concept of a 'general intellect', suggesting that at some
point a collective learning process will surpass physical labour as a
productive force, offers a promising backdrop to understand the
accomplishments of the free software community. Furthermore, the chief
concerns of hacker philosophy, creativity and technological empowerment,
closely correspond to key Marxist concepts of alienation, the division of
labour, deskilling, and commodification. At the end of my inquiry, I will
suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of
the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free
software development has a wider relevance to all future production of
information."http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_3/soderberg/
Code, Culture and Cash: The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development
By David Lancashire, First Monday
Abstract: "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."http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/lancashire/
Economics of Open Source Software
By Justin Pappas Johnson, Cornell University
"A simple model of open source software is presented. Individual
user-programmers decide whether to invest their valuable time and effort to
develop a software application that will become a public good if so
developed. The benefits and drawbacks of open source versus profit driven
developments are presented. The effect of changing the population size of
user-programmers is considered; finite and asymptotic results (relevant for
some of the larger projects that exist) are given."http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/johnsonopensource.pdf
Economic Model for Impact of Open Source Software
By Asif Khalak, MIT
"This paper presents an economic model of the impact of Open Source
Software (OSS) upon a commercial software market. Agents are used to model
the users (buyers), the companies (sellers), the code bank (marketplace),
and the OSS community (source of free goods). The effect of introducing
open source products into an equilibrium commercial market is investigated
with respect to demand structure."opensource.mit.edu/papers/osseconomics.pdf
The Simple Economics of Open Source
Josh Lerner and Jean Triole, National Bureau of Economic Research
"This paper makes a preliminary exploration of the economics of open source
software. The authors highlight the extent to which labor economics,
especially the literature of career concerns can explain many of these
project features."http://www.people.hbs.edu/jlerner/simple.pdf
Development, Ethical Trading, and Free Software
By Danny Yee
"This paper makes the political and ethical case for the adoption of free
software by Community Aid Abroad and other members of Oxfam International.
It should be applicable to development agencies generally, and to other
organisations with similar values."http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_12/yee/index.html
Free Source as Free Thought: Architecting Free Standards
By Steve Mann
"As we build cyberspace, it is up to us, as individuals, not to promote
illiteracy and proprietary standards that shut out those who fail to
purchase computer programs from a specific vendor. It has become
fashionable to blame others, such as Microsoft, for creating what is known
as the "dark ages of computing". However, I suggest that we can and should
look to ourselves as the source of the problem. In this article, I propose
the "public park" analogy as a first point of departure from current
critical thinking, and as a framework with which to better understand
possible conflict of interest in government and education. Moreover, in the
age of Personal Cybernetics (personal electronics, wearable computing,
implantables.com, etc.), this issue will become all the more important.
When "technology as extensions of mind and body" is no longer a metaphor,
will we have already sold our heart and soul for software of a particular
corporation, or will our thoughts be free?"http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_1/mann/index.html
Speeches by Robert Chassell, discussing "freedom, your rights to copy,
study, modify, and redistribute, and how such freedom leads both to lower
prices, and to collaboration."How to Shape a Technology
http://www.teak.cc/Shaping-speech.htmlFree Software: Access and Empowerment
http://www.teak.cc/Access-speech.htmlFree Software in the New Economy
http://www.teak.cc/Speech-new-economy.html
Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Edited by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman & Mark Stone
ISBN 1-56592-582-3, 280 pages
$24.95 US, $36.95 CAN
January 1999"A collection of insightful essays about the open source movement by the
people who've led it. Includes pieces by Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond,
Larry Wall, Richard Stallman, Bob Young of Red Hat, and many others. Linux,
Perl, Apache, GNU, Mozilla-you name it, they're all covered here. A must
read."
Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution 5
Perseus Press
By Glyn Moody
ISBN 0-73820-333-5, 336 pages
$27.50 US, $40.95 CAN
January 2001"Rebel Code puts Linux into historical and social contexts by tracing "free
software" from its early '80s origin and takes it as far as the end of
2000. The author charts every milestone in the development of the Linux
kernel and follows the progress of major free software projects."
The dotCommunist Manifesto: How Culture Became Property and What We're
Going to Do About It" (Video in various formats)By Eben Moglen
http://www.ibiblio.org/moglen/
Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright
By Eben Moglen, First Monday
"The spread of the Linux operating system kernel has directed attention at
the free software movement. This paper shows why free software, far from
being a marginal participant in the commercial software market, is the
vital first step in the withering away of the intellectual property
system."http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/anarchism.html
Interview with Stefan Merten, Nov. 2001: Free Software and GPL Society
by Joanne RichardsonThis interview explains some important differences between "Free Software"
and "Open Source" that I was not formerly aware of -RL.Consider this excerpt:
>> Q: In a previous interview with Geert Lovink
[http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/wilma_hiliter/nettime/200104/msg00127.html?=line=3D8]
you mentioned that the relationship between free software and Marxism is
one of the central topics debated on the list ... Do you think Marx is
still relevant for an analysis of contemporary society? Could you give an
idea of the scope of this debate on the list?First of all we recognize the difference between Marx' views and the views
of the different Marxist currents. Although different brands of Marxism
have distorted Marx' thought to the point where it has become
unrecognizable, I tend to think that only Marx' analysis gives us the
chance to understand what is going on today. The decline of the labor
society we are all witnessing in various ways cannot be understood without
that analysis. The Krisis group [http://www.krisis.org] has offered a
contemporary reading of Marx, claiming that capitalism is in decay because
the basic movement of making money from labor works less and less. This
doesn't mean that capitalism must end soon, but it won't ever be able to
hold its old promises of wealth for all. A number of people on the Oekonux
mailing list have built upon the Krisis theories and carried them onto new
ground. On the list among other things we try to interpret Marx in the
context of Free Software. It's very interesting that much of what Marx said
about the final development of capitalism can be seen in Free Software. In
a sense, we try to re-think Marx from a contemporary perspective, and
interpret current capitalism as containing a germ form of a new society.>> Q: According to many circles, Marx is obsolete - he was already
obsolete in the sixties, when the mass social upheavals and the so-called
new social movements showed that not class but other forms of oppressive
power had become determining instances and that the economic base was not
the motor that moved contradictions.I think that at that time the economic base was not as mature as it has
become today. In the last ten to twenty years Western societies started to
base their material production and all of society more and more on
information goods. The development of computers as universal information
processors with ever increasing capacity is shifting the focal point of
production from the material side to the immaterial, information side. I
think that today the development of the means of production in capitalism
has entered a new historical phase.The most important thing in this shift in the means of production is that
information has very different features than matter. First of all,
information may be copied without loss - at least digital information using
computers. Second and equally important, the most effective way to produce
interesting information is to foster creativity. Free Software combines
these two aspects, resulting in a new form of production. Obviously Free
Software uses the digital copy as a technical basis. Thus Free Software,
like any digital information, is not a scarce good; contrary to the IPR
(intellectual property rights) people, the Free Software movement
explicitly prevents making Free Software scarce. So, scarcity, which has
always been a fundamental basis for capitalism, is not present in Free
Software: Existing Free Software is available for next to zero price.More importantly, however, the organization of the production of Free
Software differs widely from that of commodities produced for maximizing
profit. For most Free Software producers there is no other reason than
their own desire to develop that software. So the development of Free
Software is based on the self-unfolding or self-actualization of the single
individual. This form of non-alienated production results in better
software because the use of the product is the first and most important aim
of the developer - there simply is no profit which could be maximized. The
self-unfolding of the single person is present in the process of
production, and the self-unfolding of the many is ensured by the
availability of high quality Free Software.Another important factor is that capitalism is in deep crisis.Until the
1970s capitalism promised a better world to people in the Western
countries, to people in the former Soviet bloc and to the Third World. It
stopped doing it starting in the 1980s and dismissed it completely in the
1990s. Today the capitalist leaders are glad if they are able to fix the
biggest leaks in the sinking ship. The resources used for that repair are
permanently increasing- be it financial operations to protect Third World
states from the inability to pay their debt, or the kind of military
operations we see in Afghanistan today.These processes were not mature in the 1960s but they are today. Maybe
today for the first time in history we are able to overcome capitalism on
the bases it has provided, by transcending it into a new society that is
less harmful than the one we have.Interview at:
http://news.openflows.org/article.pl?sid=01/12/08/0538232&mode=thread
Public money, private code
The drive to license academic research for profit is stifling the spread of
software that could be of universal benefitBy Jeffrey Benner
Jan. 4, 2002
Would the creation of the Internet be allowed to happen today?
The networked society we live in is in large part a gift from the
University of California to the world. In the 1980s, computer scientists at
Berkeley working under contract for the Defense Department created an
improved version of the Unix operating system, complete with a networking
protocol called the TCP/IP stack. Available for a nominal fee, the
operating system and network protocol grew popular with universities and
became the standard for the military's Arpanet computer network. In 1992,
Berkeley released its version of Unix and TCP/IP to the public as
open-source code, and the combination quickly became the backbone of a
network so vast that people started to call it, simply, "the Internet."Many would regard giving the Internet to the world as a benevolent act
fitting for one of the world's great public universities. But Bill Hoskins,
who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced
at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. "Whoever released the
code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he
says.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/01/04/university_open_source/index.html?x
Open Source Software for Libraries:
Thanks to Daniel Chudnov for doing this site.
Last updated 3/17/02. By Rory Litwin - rory@libr.org.