Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution

by Chris DiBona, Mark Stone, Danese Cooper

Overview

Open Sources 2.0 is a collection of insightful and thought-provoking essays from today's technology leaders that continues painting the evolutionary picture that developed in the 1999 book Open Sources: Voices from the Revolution .

These essays explore open source's impact on the software industry and reveal how open source concepts are infiltrating other areas of commerce and society. The essays appeal to a broad audience: the software developer will find thoughtful reflections on practices and methodology from leading open source developers like Jeremy Allison and Ben Laurie, while the business executive will find analyses of business strategies from the likes of Sleepycat co-founder and CEO Michael Olson and Open Source Business Conference founder Matt Asay.

From China, Europe, India, and Brazil we get essays that describe the developing world's efforts to join the technology forefront and use open source to take control of its high tech destiny. For anyone with a strong interest in technology trends, these essays are a must-read.

The enduring significance of open source goes well beyond high technology, however. At the heart of the new paradigm is network-enabled distributed collaboration: the growing impact of this model on all forms of online collaboration is fundamentally challenging our modern notion of community.

What does the future hold? Veteran open source commentators Tim O'Reilly and Doc Searls offer their perspectives, as do leading open source scholars Steven Weber and Sonali Shah. Andrew Hessel traces the migration of open source ideas from computer technology to biotechnology, and Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger and Slashdot co-founder Jeff Bates provide frontline views of functioning, flourishing online collaborative communities.

The power of collaboration, enabled by the internet and open source software, is changing the world in ways we can only begin to imagine.Open Sources 2.0 further develops the evolutionary picture that emerged in the original Open Sources and expounds on the transformative open source philosophy.

"This is a wonderful collection of thoughts and examples bygreat minds from the free software movement, and is a must have foranyone who follows free software development and project histories."

--Robin Monks, Free Software Magazine

The list of contributors include

• Alolita Sharma
• Andrew Hessel
• Ben Laurie
• Boon-Lock Yeo
• Bruno Souza
• Chris DiBona
• Danese Cooper
• Doc Searls
• Eugene Kim
• Gregorio Robles
• Ian Murdock
• Jeff Bates
• Jeremy Allison
• Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona
• Kim Polese
• Larry Sanger
• Louisa Liu
• Mark Stone
• Mark Stone
• Matthew N. Asay
• Michael Olson
• Mitchell Baker
• Pamela Jones
• Robert Adkins
• Russ Nelson
• Sonali K. Shah
• Stephen R. Walli
• Steven Weber
• Sunil Saxena
• Tim O'Reilly
• Wendy Seltzer

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596553890
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/21/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	490
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Chris DiBona is an open source software evangelist at Google. He co-edited Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (the original collection of essays) and was an editor at Slashdot.org. He has also produced Linux segments on TechTV for The ScreenSavers.

Mark Stone has made a career out of studying collaborative communities. As a university professor with a PhD in philosophy of science, he has studied and published on the disruptive community conditions that create scientific revolutions. More recent work has involved the open source community, as editor for Morgan Kaufmann Publishers covering operating systems and web technology, then as Executive Editor for Open Source at O'Reilly, and as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Linux Technology.
For the last six years he has worked with various dot-coms on tools for collaboration and online community building, including as part of the executive team managing top tier technology sites such as Slashdot (3.5 million page views per day served), and SourceForge.net (1 million registered users). As Director of Product Development for ManyOne Networks, he is currently working on the next evolution of online community, leveraging 3-D environments and new tools for knowledge management.

Danese Cooper recently joined Intel after six years as manager of Sun Microsystems' Open Source Programs Office. She was instrumental in Sun's adoption of the Sun Public License for NetBeans software, the creation of the Sun Industry Standards Source License and the new Joint Copyright Assignment, and in the adoption of a dual-licensing strategy, including selection of the GNU Lesser General Public License for OpenOffice.org.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Source Is Everything; Acknowledgments; List of Contributors; Introduction; Part I: Open Source: Competition and Evolution; Chapter 1: The Mozilla Project: Past and Future; 1.1 Founding of the Mozilla Organization: Obvious for Developers, a Bold Step for Management; 1.2 Young Adulthood—the Mozilla Foundation; 1.3 The Future; Chapter 2: Open Source and Proprietary Software Development; 2.1 Proprietary Versus Open Source?; 2.2 Comfort; 2.3 Distributed Development; 2.4 Collaborative Development; 2.5 Software Distribution; 2.6 How Proprietary Software Development Has Changed Open Source; 2.7 Some Final Words; Chapter 3: A Tale of Two Standards; 3.1 The POSIX Standard; 3.2 First Implementation Past the Post; 3.3 Future Proofing; 3.4 Wither POSIX?; 3.5 The Win32 (Windows) Standard; 3.6 The Tar Pit: Backward Compatibility; 3.7 World Domination, Fast; 3.8 Wither Win32?; 3.9 Choosing a Standard; Chapter 4: Open Source and Security; 4.1 Many Eyes; 4.2 Open Versus Closed Source; 4.3 Digression: Threat Models; 4.4 The Future; 4.5 Interesting Projects; 4.6 Conclusion; Chapter 5: Dual Licensing; 5.1 Business and Politics; 5.2 Open Source: Distribution Versus Development; 5.3 A Primer on Intellectual Property; 5.4 Dual Licensing; 5.5 Practical Considerations; 5.6 Trends and the Future; 5.7 Global Development; 5.8 Open Models; 5.9 The Future of Software; Chapter 6: Open Source and the Commoditization of Software; 6.1 Commoditization and the IT Industry; 6.2 Decommoditization: The Failure of Open Systems; 6.3 Linux: A Response from the Trenches; 6.4 "So, How Do You Make Money from Free Software?"; 6.5 The First Business Models for Linux; 6.6 Linux Commercialization at a Crossroads; 6.7 Proprietary Linux?; 6.8 What's at Stake?; Chapter 7: Open Source and the Commodity Urge: Disruptive Models for a Disruptive Development Process; 7.1 Introduction; 7.2 A Brief History of Software; 7.3 A New Brand of Intellectual Property Protection; 7.4 Open Distribution, Not Source; 7.5 Open Source Business Models; 7.6 Conclusion; Chapter 8: Under the Hood: Open Source and Open Standards Business Models in Context; 8.1 Open Standards; 8.2 Open Source Software; 8.3 The Real Business Model; 8.4 Open Source Complements; 8.5 Open Standards Complements; 8.6 Conclusion; Chapter 9: Open Source and the Small Entrepreneur; 9.1 Introduction; 9.2 Freemacs and Open Source; 9.3 Freemacs and Business; 9.4 Packet Drivers; 9.5 Packet Driver Income; 9.6 Qmail; 9.7 Open Source Economics; 9.8 Where Do We Go from Here?; 9.9 For Further Reading; Chapter 10: Why Open Source Needs Copyright Politics; 10.1 From Movable Type to MovableType; 10.2 Copyright in Code; 10.3 Secondary Liability; 10.4 Anticircumvention; 10.5 The Threat to Research; 10.6 Technology Mandates; 10.7 What About That Media Server?; Chapter 11: Libre Software in Europe; 11.1 Brief Summary of an Already Long History; 11.2 The Development Community; 11.3 The Organization of the Community; 11.4 Libre Software in the Private Sector; 11.5 Public Administrations and Libre Software; 11.6 Legal Issues; 11.7 Libre Software in Education; 11.8 Research on Libre Software; 11.9 The Future Is Hard to Read....; Chapter 12: OSS in India; 12.1 Business; 12.2 Government; 12.3 Challenges in Local Adoption of OSS; 12.4 OSS in Education; 12.5 Conclusion; Chapter 13: When China Dances with OSS; 13.1 What OSS Was and Is in China; 13.2 SWOT Analysis of OSS in China; 13.3 Where OSS Is Going for China and Beyond; Chapter 14: How Much Freedom Do You Want?; 14.1 Livre Versus Gratis; 14.2 Background for Freedom: The Market; 14.3 Developing the Software Livre Movement; 14.4 Not About Price, but About Choice; 14.5 Choice Requires More Than Free Software; 14.6 How Java Technology Can Help; 14.7 Java Provides the Other Side of the Choice; 14.8 Walking the Path; 14.9 What to Do?; 14.10 We Are Getting There; 14.11 References; Part II: Beyond Open Source: Collaboration and Community; Chapter 15: Making a New World; Chapter 16: The Open Source Paradigm Shift; 16.1 Software as Commodity; 16.2 Network-Enabled Collaboration; 16.3 Customizability and Software-as-Service; 16.4 Building the Internet Operating System; 16.5 Conclusion; Chapter 17: Extending Open Source Principles Beyond Software Development; 17.1 How Did It Happen and How Does It Work?; 17.2 Working as a Group; 17.3 Dealing with the Disrupters; 17.4 The Difference Between Doing Legal Research in Public and Writing Software in Public; 17.5 Why and When It Works; Chapter 18: Open Source Biology; 18.1 The Rise of Modern Biotechnology; 18.2 Intellectual Property and Growing Challenges; 18.3 Open Source Biology; 18.4 Synthetic Biology and Genomic Programming; 18.5 The Risk of Biological Hacking; 18.6 Future Trends in Open Source Biology; Chapter 19: Everything Is Known; 19.1 The PACT Project; 19.2 The World Trade Center Recovery Effort; 19.3 Facilitating Emergent Collaboration; 19.4 Acknowledgments; 19.5 References; Chapter 20: The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir; 20.1 Some Recent Press Reports; 20.2 Nupedia; 20.3 The Origins of Wikipedia; 20.4 Wikipedia's First Few Months; 20.5 A Series of Controversies; 20.6 My Resignation and Final Few Months with the Project; 20.7 Final Attempts to Save Nupedia; 20.8 Conclusions; Chapter 21: Open Beyond Software; 21.1 Sports Equipment Innovation by Users and Their Communities; 21.2 Community-Based Innovation and Development: An Even Broader Phenomenon; 21.3 Reframing: Where Does Innovation Come From?; 21.4 Conclusion; 21.5 References; Chapter 22: Patterns of Governance in Open Source; 22.1 The Empirical Problem Set: What Are We Aiming At? Chapter; 22.2 The Theoretical Problem: How Is Knowledge Distributed?; 22.3 Design Principles for a Referee Function; 22.4 What Should We Do Differently?; Chapter 23: Communicating Many to Many; 23.1 The Origins of Slashdot; 23.2 Slashdot in the Early Days; 23.3 The Slashdot Effect; 23.4 Trolls, Anonymous Cowards, and Insensitive Clods; 23.5 Columbine; 23.6 Slashdot Grows Up; 23.7 September 11; 23.8 Conclusion; Part III: Appendixes; Appendix A: The Open Source Definition; A.1 The Open Source Definition, Version 1.9; Appendix B: Referenced Open Source Licenses; B.1 The BSD License; B.2 The GNU General Public License (GPL); B.3 The Sleepycat License; B.4 The Creative Commons License; Appendix C: Columns from Slashdot; C.1 Simple Solutions; C.2 Why Kids Kill; Colophon;