From OpenSource

Spring 2009

College of Business[1], Kent State University[2]
Instructor: Murali Shanker

Course description

Announcements

Class Schedules

21 January 2009: Introduction

• Class format and expectations

28 January 2009: Introduction to Open Source

• Steven Weber: Chapters 1-2
• Richard Stallman: GNU Manifesto, available at: [3]
• Georg von Krogh and Eric von Hippel, The Promise of Research on Open Source Software [4], Management Science 2006 52: 975-983

Student Summaries

Class Notes

4 February 2009: Open Source as a Production Process

• Weber, Chapters 3-4
• Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project (2006), Chaps. 3-4, available at [5]
• Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, available at: [6]
• Jeffrey A. Roberts, Il-Horn Hann, and Sandra A. Slaughter. Understanding the Motivations, Participation, and Performance of Open Source Software Developers: A Longitudinal Study of the Apache Projects. Management Science 2006 52: 984-999. [7]
• Richard P. Bagozzi and Utpal M. Dholakia. Open Source Software User Communities: A Study of Participation in Linux User Groups. Management Science 2006 52: 1099-1115. [8]

Student Summaries

Class Notes

11 February 2009: Economics of Open Source

• Weber, Chapters 5-6
• George Kuk. Strategic Interaction and Knowledge Sharing in the KDE Developer Mailing List. Management Science 2006 52: 1031-1042. [9]
• Rajdeep Grewal, Gary L. Lilien, and Girish Mallapragada. Location, Location, Location: How Network Embeddedness Affects Project Success in Open Source Systems.Management Science 2006 52: 1043-1056.[10]
• Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark. The Architecture of Participation: Does Code Architecture Mitigate Free Riding in the Open Source Development Model? Management Science 2006 52: 1116-1127.[11]

Student Summaries

Class Notes

18 February 2009: Open Source and the General Public License

• GNU General Public License (GPL), available at: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
• GPL 3 is available at http://gplv3.fsf.org/
• Margaret Jane Radin, Humans, Computers, and Binding Commitment, 75 Ind. L. Rev. 1125 (2000), available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ilaw/Contract/Radin_Full.html
• Mitchell L. Stoltz, The Penguin Paradox: How the Scope of Derivative Works in Copyright Affects the Effectiveness of the GNU GPL, 85 B.U. L. Rev. 1439 (2005), available at http://www.bu.edu/law/lawreview/v85n5/Stoltz.pdf

Recommended

• Webinar Eben Moglen, chief legal counsel to the drafting of GPLv3, discusses how changes to the GPL will impact enterprise organizations. Discussion topics include the top five biggest differences between GPL v2 and GPL v3 and what it means to enterprises committed to free and open source.
• A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects

Class Notes

25 February 2009: Open Source Business Models

• Weber, Chapter 7-8

Class Notes

Additional Readings

• Business Model built on Software Patents?

4 March 2009: Open Source and Software Industry

• Ronald Mann, The Commercialization of Open Source Software: Do Property Rights Still Matter?, 20 Harv. J. L. & Tech., available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=802805
• IBM Corp., Open Source and Linux, available at http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/industry/opensource.shtml
• Pamela Samuelson, IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source, 49 Comm. ACM, available at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/CACM%20IBM%20open%20source.pdf
• Eben Moglen, Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright, in THE COMMODIFICATION OF INFORMATION 107 (Niva Elkin-Koren & Neil Weinstock Netanel, eds. 2002), available at: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html

11 March 2009: Open Source and Software Industry (cont.)

• Sean Silverthorne, Microsoft v. Open Source: Who Will Win?, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, available at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4834&t=technology
• Open Source Software: Microsoft at the Power Point, The Economist, Sept. 11, 2003, available at http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2054746 Need to get full document link.
• Tim O'Reilly, Open Source Paradigm Shift, available at: http://tim.oreilly.com/articles/paradigmshift_0504.html
• Ray Ozzie, The Internet Services Disruption, Oct. 28, 2005, available at http://www.scripting.com/disruption/ozzie/TheInternetServicesDisruptio.htm

18 March 2009: Open Source and Software Industry (cont.)

• Sonali K. Shah. Motivation, Governance, and the Viability of Hybrid Forms in Open Source Software Development. Management Science 2006 52: 1000-1014.[12]
• Alan MacCormack, John Rusnak, and Carliss Y. Baldwin. Exploring the Structure of Complex Software Designs: An Empirical Study of Open Source and Proprietary Code. Management Science 2006 52: 1015-1030.[13]
• Nicholas Economides and Evangelos Katsamakas. Two-Sided Competition of Proprietary vs. Open Source Technology Platforms and the Implications for the Software Industry. Management Science 2006 52: 1057-1071.[14]
• Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Pankaj Ghemawat. Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows. Management Science 2006 52: 1072-1084.[15]
• Andrea Bonaccorsi, Silvia Giannangeli, and Cristina Rossi. Entry Strategies Under Competing Standards: Hybrid Business Models in the Open Source Software Industry. Management Science 2006 52: 1085-1098.[16]

1 April 2009: Government Policy Toward Open Source

• Committee for Economic Development, Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness (April 2006), available at [17]

8 April 2009: Open Access Journals and Publications

• Peter Suber, Open Access Overview, available at [18]
• Charles W. Bailey, Jr., What is Open Access?, available at [19]
• David J. Solomon, Strategies for Developing Sustainable Open Access Scholarly Journals, First Monday, available at [20]
• Jessica Litman, The Economics of Open-Access Law Publishing, Lewis & Clark L. Rev, available at [21]

Recommended:

• Patrick O. Brown, Michael B. Eisen, Harold E. Varmus, Why PLoS Became a Publisher, available at [22]
• Charlotte Tschider, Investigating the “Public” in the Public Library of Science: Gifting Economics in the Internet Community, First Monday, available at [23]
• [24]The Open Library. The Stanford Open Source Lab presents Aaron Swartz talking about The Open Library. This event took place on November 29th 2007 at Stanford University.

Additional Links:

• Open Access Journals
• Open Knowledge Society
• Bentham Journals

15 April 2009: Open Source Biology

• David Opderbeck, The Penguin’s Genome, or Coase and Open Source Biotechnology, 18 Harv. J. L. & Tech. 167 (2004), available at [25]
• Stephen M. Maurer, Arti Rai, & Andrej Sali, Finding Cures for Tropical Diseases: Is Open Source the Answer?, 1 PLoS Medicine 180 (Dec. 2004), available at [26]

Recommended:

• Arti Rai, Open and Collaborative Research: A New Model for Biomedicine, in Intellectual Property Rights in Frontier Industries 131 (Robert W. Hahn ed., AEI-Brookings Press 2005), available at: [27]

Additional information (upstream/downstream patents) [28]

22 April 2009: Wikipedia

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_Pillars
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines
• How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elizabeth Bower, and Kizu Naoko, available at http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/2006/wikisym-2006-interview.html
• Denise Anthony, Sean Smith, & Tim Williamson, Explaining Quality in Internet Collective Goods: Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia (Nov. 2005), available at http://web.mit.edu/iandeseminar/Papers/Fall2005/anthony.pdf.
• Jaron Lanier, Digital Maoism: Hazards of the Collective Mind, The Edge, 5/30/06, available at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html
• Selected responses to Lanier’s article (Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Larry Sanger, Viegas and Wattenberg, & Jimmy Wales), available at http://www.edge.org/discourse/digital_maoism.html

Additional Links

• Wikiversity, Wikipedia, and Participatory Learning, December 19, 2007. The speakers were Sue Gardner and Erik Moeller of the Wikimedia Foundation. The video was released under a Creative Commons attribution license.
• The battle for Wikipedia's Soul Mar 6th 2008, The Economist print edition

29 April 2009: Social Production of Music and Other Digital Content

• Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006), Chap. 1, available at [29]
• Creative Commons Licenses, [30]
• CC Mixter, [31]
• Niva Elkin-Koren, Exploring Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit, in The Future of the Public Domain: Identifying the Commons in Information Law (2006), available at [32]
• Zachary Katz, Pitfalls of Open Licensing: An Analysis of Creative Commons Licensing, 46 IDEA 391

6 May 2009: User-Created Value and Virtual Economies

• Mia Garlick, Creative Commons presentation in Second Life, April 24, 2006. "Age of the Conducer," transcript available at [33]
• Second Life Terms of Service, available at [34]
• Cory Ondrejka, Escaping the Gilded Cage: User Created Content and Building the Metaverse, 49 N.Y.L.S. L. Rev. 81 (2004), available at [35]
• Dan Hunter & F. Gregory Lastowka, The Laws of the Virtual Worlds, 92 Cal. L. Rev. 1 (2004), available at [36]

Recommended:

• Clickable Culture (focus on articles on Second Life), [37]

13 May 2009: Student Presentations

Assignments

• Mini Assignment 1
• Assignment 1
• Assignment 2
• Project

Your responsibilities include reading assigned articles, class participation, including Wiki editing, two assignments, and one final project. Your grade will be based on one-third class participation and mini assignments, one-third total for the two assignments, and one-third for the project.

Only selective readings have been assigned. As such, students are expected to think and reflect on the material carefully. The tone and content of class discussions will reflect that expectation. Most weeks, you will be given a mini-assignment that encourages you to explore many of the Open Source concepts discussed in class. As part of the assignment, you will be asked to summarize your experiences on this wiki.

In addition, each week I will ask one or more students to write short entries about the readings for that week on the class wiki. Please post your response on your assigned week before class that week. I hope that with enough eyes and input, this wiki becomes a valuable resource about Open Source. So, please comment freely in class and on the wiki about any resources that you feel are valuable towards our understanding of Open Source.

Collaborative Projects

In keeping with our discussion, I am starting a new thread for collaborative papers.

• A Case Study in the Development, Teaching, and Learning using Open-Source Style Philosophies

Software

• Distrowatch All the linux distributions you ever want
• NoMachine Desktop virtualization and client
• Knoppix: Linux based security distribution

Additional Reading

• [38] news on Ubuntu.
• Revolution_OS is a 2001 documentary which traces the history of GNU, Linux, and the open source and free software movements.
• Interview Why GPL may need to be extended to Software as a Service.
• FossologyHP released a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open source project was licensed, Over time HP will develop additional Agents that can be used to perform all sorts of useful analysis on software of all kinds.
• Some numerical data on the size of some OS projects [39]

Questions

• Do you have Questions about Open Source, its limitations, its successes. Post them here.

Course Information

Class Times

Wednesday, 3:30 - 5:45, A404 BSA

Textbooks

Required: The Success of Open Source

Office Hours

W: Before class, or as needed. Just let me know.

Contact Information

Murali Shanker

Office: A401 BSA

Phone: 2-1165

E-mail

Personal Web Page

Students

Murali Shanker

Wiki Help

Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.

Acknowledgements

Much of the structure of this course has been borrowed from the Open Source course taught at Berkeley [40]