Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright - Eben Moglen wrote this 1999 paper. 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.
Copyright vs. Copyleft Licencing and Software Development - This August 2007 working paper, by Massimo D'Antoni and Maria Alessandra Rossi, aims at clarifying the role played by licenses within the increasingly relevant Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon. In particular, the article explores from a theoretical point of view the comparative properties of the two main categories of OSS license--copyleft and non-copyleft licenses--in terms of their ability to stimulate innovation and coordination of development efforts. In order to do so, the paper relies on an incomplete contracting model. The model shows that, in spite of the fact that copyleft licenses entail the enjoyment of a narrower set of rights by both licensors and licensees, they may be preferred to non-copyleft licenses when coordination of complementary investments in development is important. It thus provides a non-ideologically-based explanation for the puzzling evidence showing the dominance, in terms of diffusion, of copyleft licenses.
Creation Nets: Harnessing the Potential of Open Innovation - By John Hagel III and John Seely Brown,April 2006, this document discusses the creation of and participation in Creation Nets. Open Source Software Initiative is presented as one form of a Creation Net. The article focuses on the need for and benefits of establishing/using Creation Nets as a relatively new strategy/management approach for fostering open innovation. It is high level and does not address specific "how to" procedures.
Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study - This June 2002 paper is the final report for a study conducted by the International Institute of Infonomics, University of Maastricht and Berlecon Research. The project reported on conducted surveys to generate a unique base of primary data on Free/Open Source Software usage and development; identifying indicators to measure value creation and dissemination in the OS/FS arena; identifying business models based on these indicators; identifying the impact of and recommending changes in government policy and regulatory environments with regards to OS/FS; finally, the development of a base for extending these to the broader economic measurement of non-monetary and trans-monetary activity in the information society, beyond the domain of OS/FS.
Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar Raymondism) - Nikolai Bezroukov wrote this 1999 paper. According to this paper, Eric Raymond's bazaar model provides a too simplistic view of the open source software (OSS) development process. This paper tries to explore links between open source software development and academic research as a better paradigm for OSS development. Open source software development should better be viewed as a special case of academic research. Viewing OSS this way probably can lead to a better understanding of open source phenomena.
Research on Innovation - Research on Innovation is a non-profit organization created to conduct, sponsor and promote research on technological innovation and to disseminate the results of this research to a broad audience, both in academia and in industry. This web site provides a number of downloadable papers by James Bessen, Michael Meurer, Cecil Quillen, Jr., and F. M. Scherer.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar - This 1998 article, by Eric S. Raymond, anatomizes a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. Raymond discusses these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. He shows that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. He then makes a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", suggests productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and concludes with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.
Use of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) in the U.S. Department of Defense (PDF) - This report documents the results of a short email-mediated study by The MITRE Corporation, conducted in 2002, on the use of free and open-source software (FOSS) in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). FOSS is distinctive because it gives users the right to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve it as they see fit, without having to ask permission from or make fiscal payments to any external group or person. The goals of the MITRE study were to develop as complete a listing of FOSS applications used in the DoD as possible, and to collect representative examples of how those applications are being used. Over a two-week period the survey identified a total of 115 FOSS applications and 251 examples of their use.
Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in FLOSS Projects - This paper, by Karim Lakhani and Robert G. Wolf, is an MIT Sloan Working Paper. This paper reports on the results of a study of the effort and motivations of individuals to contributing to the creation of Free License/Open Source software. The authors used a Web-based survey, administered to 684 software developers in 287 FLOSS projects, to learn what lies behind the effort put into such projects. Academic theorizing on individual motivations for participating in FLOSS projects has posited that external motivational factors in the form of extrinsic benefits (e.g.: better jobs, career advancement) are the main drivers of effort. The authors find in contrast, that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver. They also find that user need, intellectual stimulation derived from writing code, and improving programming skills are top motivators for project participation. A majority of the respondents are skilled and experienced professionals working in IT-related jobs, with approximately 40 percent being paid to participate in the FLOSS project.
DACS Gold Practice Initiative
