Top Highlights

• The conventional notion of property is, of course, the right to exclude you from using something that belongs to me. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude.
• Patents, copyrights, licensing schemes, and other means of "protecting" knowledge ensure that economic rents are created and that some proportion of those…
• Open source is an experiment in building a political economy-that is, a system of sustainable value creation and a set of governance mechanisms. In this case it is a governance system that holds together a community of producers around this counterintuitive notion of property rights as distribution. It is also a political economy that taps into a b...
• How is it that groups of computer programmers (sometimes very large groups) made up of individuals separated by geography, corporate boundaries, culture, language, and other characteristics, and connected mainly via telecommunications bandwidth, manage to work together over time and build complex, sophisticated software systems…
• The observation is that collaborative open source software projects such as Linux and Apache have demonstrated that a large and complex system of software code can be built, maintained, developed, and extended in a nonproprietary setting in which many…