The Positive Effects of Open Sourcing
The positive effects of open sourcing
Gavin Hoffman
In recent years open sourcing has begun to attract the attention of many economists and social scientists for two main reasons: the growing importance of the open source movement in the software industry and some of the features of open source development appear quite paradoxical to traditional economic reasoning or intellectual property rights. But what is the open source movement and how is it impacting on the software industry? How does the open source licensing scheme compare with intellectual property rights? What are the benefits of open source and how does it play into the proposal of the 'Long Tail ' theory?
Open source is a term that became popular with the internet. It falls under the GNU General Public License which is a copyleft license. Copyleft provides a method for software or documentation to be modified, reproduced, adapted, and/or distributed once it is bound by the same scheme. It can also be viewed as a copyright licensing scheme in which an author surrenders some but not all rights under copyright law. Instead of allowing work to fall complete into the public domain an author can impose some but not all copyright restrictions on those who want to engage in activities that would otherwise be copyright infringement. Richard Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license which was revolutionary for its time. He launched the Free Software movement in 1983 for both practical and ethical reasons. Free software in this sense isn 't referring to price but to freedom, “To understand the concept of Free software , you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer” (Puttonen, 2001, The Code). Stallman is still an outspoken political campaigner for the movement as he believes that intellectual property rights in regards to software are
Gavin Hoffman
In recent years open sourcing has begun to attract the attention of many economists and social scientists for two main reasons: the growing importance of the open source movement in the software industry and some of the features of open source development appear quite paradoxical to traditional economic reasoning or intellectual property rights. But what is the open source movement and how is it impacting on the software industry? How does the open source licensing scheme compare with intellectual property rights? What are the benefits of open source and how does it play into the proposal of the 'Long Tail ' theory?
Open source is a term that became popular with the internet. It falls under the GNU General Public License which is a copyleft license. Copyleft provides a method for software or documentation to be modified, reproduced, adapted, and/or distributed once it is bound by the same scheme. It can also be viewed as a copyright licensing scheme in which an author surrenders some but not all rights under copyright law. Instead of allowing work to fall complete into the public domain an author can impose some but not all copyright restrictions on those who want to engage in activities that would otherwise be copyright infringement. Richard Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license which was revolutionary for its time. He launched the Free Software movement in 1983 for both practical and ethical reasons. Free software in this sense isn 't referring to price but to freedom, “To understand the concept of Free software , you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer” (Puttonen, 2001, The Code). Stallman is still an outspoken political campaigner for the movement as he believes that intellectual property rights in regards to software are
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