I have been reading The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber and wanted to share some of what I’ve learned. Steven Weber is a political scientist and so he approaches his analysis of open source from that viewpoint. For me it was a bit hard to take off my programmer/librarian hat and put on a political one - but it has been an interesting read.

Weber starts the book:

I’m a political scientist and I worry more about how communities are governed than i do about technology per se. I became interested in open source as an emerging technological community that seemed to solve what I see as a very tricky but basically familiar governance problems, in a very unfamiliar and intriguing way. In the end I’ve decided, and I argue in this book, that the open source community has done something even more important. By experimenting with fundamental notions of what constitutes property, this community has reframed and recast some of the most basic problems of governance. At the same time, it is remaking the politics and economics of the software world. If you believe (as I do) that software constitutes at once some of the core tools and core rules for the future of how human beings work together to create wealth, beauty, new ideas, and solutions to problems, then understanding how open source can change those processes is very important. (p.vii)

Makes open source sound pretty powerful - doesn’t it?

Throughout the book Weber talks about how each open source community, while spread across continents and time zones, has come up with its own ways of governing and keeping order. He focuses on the most famous open source example - Linux - and shows how the software grew and how the community keeps tabs on its future growth.

Weber talks about licenses and their role in the open source world:

Open source collaboration depends on an explicit intellectual property regime, codified in a series of licenses. It is, however, a regime built around a set of assumptions and goals that are different from those of mainstream intellectual property rights thinking. The principal goal of the open source intellectual property regime is to maximize the ongoing use, growth, development, and distribution of free software. To achieve that goal, this regime shifts the fundamental optic of intellectual property rights away from protecting the prerogatives of an authors toward protecting the prerogatives of generations of users. (p.84)

He continues on to talk about conflict resolution in the open source world. He points out that sometimes these battles can get very heated because people have such a stake in the software they are developing. It’s interesting to see this front hand while working on an open source project. One thing I say in my talks is that open source developers love their products - and this is very clear as these conflicts become personal. Weber explains the various ways that this conflicts are resolved in different environments. In smaller open source projects it’s harder to resolve differences because there is no one governing party, but in the larger projects it becomes a bit easier.

For example (since I know it well) the Koha project has a team of managers who have worked very closely with the project either from the beginning or for an long enough time. These ‘managers’ look out of the Koha product on the whole and are usually the ones who contribute the most patches/code/input. In the Linux world, Linus Torvalds plays the role of manager - an excellent one according to Weber.

While I had a hard time following some of the very political parts of this book, it has been an interesting read and should be required reading for anyone who’s just jumping into the open source world. I’d also recommend it to librarians who want to learn more about open source - but aren’t terribly techie - since this title looks at things from a non-techie angle.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 8:02 am by Nicole C. Engard and is filed under Books, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.