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Free Software Reading Group

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This is the homepage for a reading group and course on free and open source software being offered by the Media, Arts and Sciences program during Fall 2008.

Basic Facts

Description
The reading group will try to showcase a number of perspective on free and open source software. The first session will be history and primary materials to introduce people to the history and important concepts and definition of free software and open source. The second meeting will try to help ground further reading through important "outside" sources that might help illuminate the phenomena. The rest of the reading group will be focused on analysis and descriptions of free and open source software artifacts, processes, ideas, and communities that can roughly be divided into more anthropological or ethnographic analyses, more economic and econometric analyses, and more philosophical analyses.
Who should participate?
Participation is open to anyone affiliated with MIT. The reading group will be ideal for people who have heard about, used or developed free and open source software and are interested in learning about how it works. For Media Lab students, it will be ideal for people who are applying an "open source model" in one of their own projects.
Time Comittment
The readings aim to be approximately one book or equivalent in articles per session or roughly one book every other week. The sessions will meet for between 1.5 and 2 hours. Those taking the course for credit should also expect to produce 500-1000 word response papers for each session.
Instructor
Chris Csíkszentmihályi (Professor, MAS)
Coordinator
Benjamin Mako Hill (PhD Candidate, Sloan; Fellow, C4FCM; Director, FSF)
Meeting Time
The group will meet bi-weekly during the Fall 2008 semester at a time TBD. If you plan on participating, please vote for a meeting time that you can make.
Course Credit
The reading group can be taken for 6-units of course credit. Students participating in the reading group for credit will be expected to produce a 500-1000 word response papers to the readings. These responses will be hosted on this wiki as a way of helping build up knowledge about the topics and issues covered. There will be no final project. Students should contact Chris to add the class before the MIT add deadline on October 3rd.

If you questions, concerns, or issues, please contact Benjamin Mako Hill at mako@mit.edu.

Proposed Sessions

These sessions and the readings are subject in to change. In many cases, we'll be reading only a subsection each week.

Session 1: History and primary materials

Fogel, Karl. 2005. Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project. O'Reilly Media, Inc.  

Levy, Steven, and Steven Levy. 2001. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Updated. Penguin (Non-Classics).   (Epilog)

Raymond, Eric S. 1999. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. edited by Tim O'Reilly. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly and Associates.  

Stallman, R. 2002. “The Free Software Definition.” Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman”, Boston: GNU.  

Stallman, Richard M. 2002. Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman. Free Software Foundation.  

Session 2: Background and foundational readings

Hesse, Carla. 2002. “The rise of intellectual property, 700 B.C.-A.D. 2000: An idea in the balance.” Daedalus 131:26.  

Shirky, Clay. 2008. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Press HC, The.   (Chapter: “Failure For Free”)

Winner, Langdon. 1988. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. University Of Chicago Press.   (In particular, Chapter “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”)

SEssion 3: Philosophical perspectives

Chopra, Samir, and Scott Dexter. 2007. Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software. 1st ed. Routledge.  

Feller, Joseph et al. 2005. Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software.   (“Open Code and Open Societies” by Lawrence Lessig)

Meretz, Stefan. 2007. “GNU/Linux is not a thing of value -- and that is fine!.” Open Theory. http://www.opentheory.org/linux-worthless/text.phtml (Accessed September 8, 2008).

Merten, Stefan. 2000. “GNU/Linux - Milestone on the Way to the GPL Society.” in Processings of LinuxTag 2000. Karlsruhe, Germany http://www.oekonux.org/texts/meilenstein/english.html (Accessed September 8, 2008).

Merten, Stefan. 2001. “Free Software & GPL Society.” http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/mertentext.html (Accessed September 8, 2008).

Seaman, Graham. 2002. “The Two Economies: Why the washing machine question is the wrong question.” http://www.oekonux.org/list-en/archive/msg02563.html (Accessed September 7, 2008).

= Session 4: Anthropological perspectives (Part 1)

Coleman, Gabriella. 2003. “The (copylefted) Source Code for the Ethical Production of Information Freedom».” Sarai Reader: Shaping Technologies 297-302.  

Coleman, Gabriella. 2004. “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast.” Anthropological Quarterly 77:507-519.  

Coleman, Gabriella. 2005. “The Social Construction of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics, and the Liberal Tradition.” University of Chicago.  

Kelty, Christopher. 2008. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham: Duke University Press.  

Economic perspectives

Lakhani, Karim. 2006. “The core and the periphery in distributed and self-organizing innovation systems.” Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34144 (Accessed September 8, 2008).  

Lakhani, Karim R., and Eric von Hippel. 2003. “How open source software works: "free" user-to-user assistance.” Research Policy 32:923-943.  

Riehle, Dirk. 2007. “The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives.” Computer 25-32.  

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