Menu Close
Research Library

Research

I’ve begun compiling some research material for this project — some are pieces I’ve read and some are ones which looked interesting and helpful, but I haven’t had time to delve into yet. Unless I’ve annotated an entry, it won’t be clear which are which, but don’t infer anything from a missing annotation. I’ll try to remove anything that later proves unhelpful. Lists are in no particular order.

Research Materials & Resources

These are collections of material to sift through in order to write sourced, well-researched articles.

This is a work in progress, so links and topics may rotate in and out at any time as the overall writing project comes together.

Free & Open Source Software Ethos

FOSS Overview, History, & Foundation

  • Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
  • Tozzi, Christopher. For Fun and Profit: A History of the Open Source Software Revolution
  • Stallman, RIchard. Free as in Freedom
  • Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code
  • RevolutionOS (Documentary)
  • Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar
  • Raymond, Eric S. “A Brief History of Hackerdom” (2000)
  • Torvalds, Linus & Diamond, David. Just for Fun: The Story of An Accidental Revolutionary (2001)
  • Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger. The Cluetrain Manifesto cluetrain.com (1999)
  • Bui, Peter. Hackers in the Bazaar — Course material for CSE 40802, University of Notre Dame (2021?)
  • Carillo, Kevin & Okoli, Chitu. “The open source movement: A revolution in software development” in Journal of Computer Information Systems 49:1-9 (2008).
    Published Abstract:
    The open source movement is based on a radical retake on copyright law to create high quality software whose use and development are guaranteed to the public. In this article we trace the history of the movement, highlighting its interaction with intellectual property law. The movement has spawned open source software (OSS) communities where developers and users meet to create software that meets their needs. We discuss the demographic profile of OSS participants, their ideology, their motivations, and the process of OSS development. Then we examine the impacts of OSS on society as a whole from the perspective of the information society, discussing the effects on OSS developers, users of OSS, and society at large, particularly in developing countries.

FOSS Culture, the Hacker Ethic, & Gift Culture

FOSS as Gift Culture

  • The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture
  • MA 11: Maggie Appleton on Open Source as a Gift Economy
  • Participating in a gift economy: Are you giving enough? | Opensource.com
  • Bergquist, Magnus & Ljungberg, Jan. “The Power of Gifts: Organizing Social Relationships in Open Source Communities” in Information Systems Journal 11(4):305-320 (October 2001).
    Published Abstract:
    In writings on the open source software development model, it is often argued that it is successful as a result of the gift economy that embraces activ- ities in online communities. However, the theoretical foundations for this argument are seldom discussed and empirically tested. Starting with the ‘classic’ theories of gift giving, we discuss how they need to be developed in order to explain gift- giving practices in digital domains. In this paper, we argue that the gift economy is important, not only because it creates openness, but also because it organizes relationships between people in a certain way. Open source software development relies on gift giving as a way of getting new ideas and prototypes out into circu- lation. This also implies that the giver gets power from giving away. This power is used as a way of guaranteeing the quality of the code. We relate this practice to how gifts, in the form of new scientific knowledge, are given to the research com- munity, and how this is done through peer review processes.
  • Zeitlyn, David. “Gift economies in the development of open source software: Anthropological reflections” (March 2003)
    Published Abstract:
    Building on Eric Raymond’s work this article discusses the motivation and rewards that lead some software engineers to participate in the open source movement. It is suggested that software engineers in the open source movement may have subgroupings which parallel kinship groups such as lineages. Within such groups gift giving is not necessarily or directly reciprocated, instead members work according to the axiom of kinship amity' -- direct economic calculation is not appropriate within the group. What Bourdieu callssymbolic capital’ can be used to understand how people work in order to enhance the reputation (of themselves and their group). Keywords: gift economy/ cathedral and bazaar/ Eric Raymond/Non-economic motivation/prestige/symbolic capital/ Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing Department of Anthropology, Eliot College The University of Kent Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NS Telephone +44 1227 764 000 #3360 Fax (44) 1227 827 289 Email: URL: http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/dz/ When approaching the open source software as analysts; in our attempts to understand the `open source movement’ we need to do more than look at the economics of software development and marketing. Eric Raymond’s papers were among the earliest and most influential examples of using social theory to help us think about the actors, without whom there would be no software, and hence nothing to discuss! This article has been written as a response to these papers which lead to some suggestions about how other parts of anthropological theory may help future research. In systems not governed by classical economics, time and quantity are not counted. In such systems there are no metrics for these variables. Ideas of ownership exist but these are symbolic since, by definition, with o…
  • Egbert, Henrik. EconPapers: The Gift and Open Science (2018-04)
    Published Abstract:
    This short note illustrates how social structures and behavior of scientists in the societal sub-system of open science resemble patterns analyzed in the Gift, an essay written by Marcel Mauss nearly 100 years ago. The presented analysis goes beyond existing interpretations of gift giving in science. The latter has mainly focused on the exchange of knowledge and citations. I argue that the Gift explains also identity, competition, co-opetition, rituals, and punishment. Mauss’s Gift is seen as a complementary model to existing economic and sociological approaches regularly used to analyze structures and behavior in open science. By accentuating such an anthropological approach, I conclude that the Gift provides explanations of the stability and the expansion of the open science community.
  • Mauss, Marcel. The Gift

The FOSS Economy

  • Oberhaus, Daniel. “The Internet Was Built on the Free Labor of Open Source Developers. Is That Sustainable?”, Vice (February 14, 2019)
  • Warren, Tom. “Microsoft: we were wrong about open source”, The Verge. (May 18, 2020)
  • Raymond, Eric S. The Magic Cauldron (June 1999)
    Published Abstract:
    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.