Open Social Scholarship Annotated Bibliography/Open Source

Category Overview
Open source is an umbrella term that generally refers to the practice of sharing, modifying, and reusing software code freely and houses a number of initiatives, such as the Free Software and Open Source movements. These initiatives have a rich history; they are responsible for the open structure of the internet, and serve as prominent voices in the defense of user interest in contemporary internet policy debates, such as the battle over privacy-related issues (Kelty 2008). This category covers materials related to the development of open source programs, from its origins with Linux and Apache to its potential for collaborative software development (Godfrey and Tu 2000; Hars and Ou 2001; Lerner and Triole 2002). The resources range from the theoretical to the technical and political. Many of the articles focus on Apache and Linux as the primary models for economic success in the open source software community. In this category, the open source software model is frequently juxtaposed with the commercial model, represented by Microsoft, to reveal comparative successes and areas of improvement (West 2003). Overall, this category traces the historical development of open source and speculates about its potential directions.

Annotations
Bastian, Mathieu, Sebastien Heymann, and Mathieu Jacomy. 2009. “Gephi: An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks.” Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/publications/Gephi%20paper.pdf.
 * Bastian, Heymann, and Jacomy describe the development of their open software tool, Gephi, which is used for graph and network analysis. The software presents large networks in real time using a 3D render engine. This technique uses the graphic card while leaving the CPU memory free for other computing. The user interface is structured into workspaces, through which algorithms, filters, or tools can be easily added, even by those with little programming experience. Visualization modules can be exported as SVG or PDF files, and Rich SVG Export –a powerful SVG exporter – is included with Gephi. Dynamic networks can be played in Gephi as movie sequences. The architecture of the software is interoperable, and data sources can be created easily to communicate with existing software, third party databases, and web services. The authors note that they are searching for better ways to adapt the user interface to users’ needs. The program has successfully been used for internet link and semantic network case studies.

Bonaccorsi, Andrea, and Cristina Rossi. 2003. “Why Open Source Software Can Succeed.” Research Policy 32 (7): 1243–58.
 * Bonaccorsi and Rossi discuss the questions of motivation, coordination, and diffusion raised by the emergence of open source software. They note that hierarchical coordination emerged without proprietary rights, yet open source systems are diffused in environments dominated by proprietary standards. The authors attempt to understand how an immense group of unpaid programmers have advanced open source technology to its present stage. The hobbyist groups and hacker culture, which consists of programmers trained in engineering and physics fields, are noted as the primary groups participating in the development of open source software. This hybrid business model—whereby companies and software houses produce software, give it away to customers free of charge, and shift the value towards additional services (packaging, consultancy, maintenance, updating and training)—is suggested as a productive alternative. The recent tendency for open source programs to become more user friendly will enable even wider diffusion into increasingly broad communities.

Bruns, Axel. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.
 * Bruns’ book on blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and other virtual landscapes discusses how creative, collaborative, and ad hoc engagement with content in user-led spaces is no longer accurate. User-led content production is built instead on iterative and evolutionary development models in which large communities make a number of very small incremental changes to established knowledge bases. He uses the concept of “produsage” to describe changes to user-led content management systems. The comparative significance of distinction between producers and users of content has faded over time. The opening chapters detail open source software development; later ones move to case studies of news blogs, citizen journals, Wikipedia, and what he terms the “produsage of folksonomies,” referring to knowledge structures that encapsulate economic environments of their own. He discusses “produsage” in terms of education, video games, and creative structures, and concludes with a chapter on how democracy itself can be re-examined in light of the “produsage” structure.

Childs, Merilyn, and Regine Wagner. 2015. “Open Sourced Personal, Networked Learning and Higher Education Credentials.” In Open Learning and Formal Credentialing in Higher Education, edited by Shirley Reushie, Amy Antonio, and Mike Keppell, 223–44. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
 * Childs and Wagner claim to present an Imaginarium in their article, which they define as a type of place dedicated to imagination that may struggle to exist in institutional reality. The authors use imaginary reconstruction (fiction writing in research spaces) to construct a plausible and comprehensible text that offers an alternative to current institutional thought and practice. The text weaves in and out of fiction, with the first sections discussing global citizenship and research performed by the United Nations. The authors stage their semi-fictional discussion at the 46th triennial Australian Labor Party National Conference of December 3, 2011. A same-sex marriage protest in support of dropping queer-phobic Australian legislation occurred outside of the event, and the authors create a character, Ludmilla, to narrate some of their concerns. They follow her involvement in the protest and narrate many of the works she would have encountered prior to that moment in order to provide evidence of the type of person who would benefit from recognition of prior learning (RPL) developments. This includes authentic and service learning, ePortfolios, learning pathways between vocational and university studies, and open learning practices in higher education.

** Chopra, Samir, and Scott Dexter. 2009. “The Freedoms of Software and Its Ethical Uses.” Ethics and Information Technology 11 (4): 287–97. https://doi:.org/10.1007/s10676-009-9191-0.
 * Chopra explains that the difference between free and proprietary software is that the latter restricts user actions through end user license agreement while the former eliminates restrictions on users. He explains the concept of free software, talking about software freedom, the Freedom Zero problem, the ethical use of scientific knowledge, and scientific knowledge and property rights. He then discusses community discourse and Freedom Zero (the freedom to use a software in any way or for any purpose), explaining that Freedom Zero supports deliberative discourse within the development and user communities. When exploring the ethical uses of software, Chopra answers the question of whether Freedom Zero is inaccurate and whether a free software licensor could be liable for granting Freedom Zero. The author concludes that Freedom Zero facilitates a broader debate about software’s larger social significance.

Dahlander, Linus, and Mats G. Magnusson. 2005. “Relationships between Open Source Software Companies and Communities: Observations from Nordic Firms.” Research Policy 34 (4): 481–93.
 * Dahlander and Magnusson consider the relationship between firms and communities in regard to open source software. Open source software is not directly controlled by firms but resides within communities that form the firms. The authors use Nordic open source software firms as a case study to examine the symbiotic, commensalistic, and parasitic approaches to handling firm-community relationships. Firms release source codes in order to get their product widely adopted, as this increases the likelihood of attracting skilled developers and a higher pace of technological development. The authors collected annual reports, company directories, business and specialist press, and homepages to get an idea of the competitive environment, important milestones, and outside perceptions of four firms: MySQL, Cendio, Roxen, and SOT. The authors note that people working within communities share innovations, which are often not protected by intellectual copyrights. Firms in turn benefit from this and can create and maintain relationships with these communities.

Feller, Joseph, and Brian Fitzgerald. 2002. Understanding Open Source Software Development. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Longman.
 * Feller and Fitzgerald attempt to understand the success of open source publication. The authors tackle discussions to define the open source software development method: how it works, its sustainability, and what tools can enable it. They provide an overview of different open source software and accompanying licenses, a brief history of the open source software movement, a landscape of the organizations currently at the front of open source affairs, how to organize open source processes, and the different motivations behind open source development. The authors argue that the hacker ethic has commonalities with the pre-Protestant work ethic motivated by passion and freedom and is well suited to the needs of the network society. Open source software is more than just a fad, and it will come to define the industry rather than be a symptom of it.

Fitzgerald, Brian. 2006. “The Transformation of Open Source Software.” MIS Quarterly 30 (3): 587–98.
 * Fitzgerald contends that the open source software (OSS) movement has metamorphosed into a mainstream and commercially viable form of publishing, which he labels as OSS 2.0. He argues that describing the open source community as a collective of supremely talented developers who volunteer their services to develop high quality software is a myth. He characterizes the first phase of the OSS movement as Free Open Source Software (FOSS), and creates charts that illustrate what he sees as the defining characteristics of both the earlier and the developing movements. Fitzgerald discusses aspects of FOSS, including product licensing and support. The discussion then shifts to OSS 2.0––of which Fitzgerald notes the design and analysis phases have become more deliberate than FOSS. Market creation strategies, value added service enabling, and product support are discussed. He concludes by suggesting that open source research exacerbates problems when scholars continue to focus their efforts on repeatedly studying project characteristics and developer motivation.

Godfrey, Michael W., and Qiang Tu. 2000. “Evolution in Open Source Software: A Case Study.” In ICSM ‘00 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM ‘00). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.
 * Godfrey and Tu note that most studies of software evolution since the year 2000 have been performed on systems developed within a single company using traditional management techniques. The authors use the open source Linux operating system Kernel as a case study for further investigations. As of the time of writing, Linux included over two million lines of code and did not have a tightly planned development model. The authors use graphs to demonstrate the growth of smaller core subsystems, arch subsystems, and the driver subsystems in Linux over its lifespan. Kernel has been very successful and the authors comment that the "black-box" examination has not been enough––researchers must investigate the nature of the subsystems and explore their evolutionary patterns to understand how and why the system as a whole has evolved.

Hars, Alexander, and Shaosong Ou. 2001. “Working for Free? – Motivations of Participating in Open Source Projects.” In Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2001). Washington, DC: IEEE.
 * Hars and Ou discuss the success of the Linux operating system, which has demonstrated the viability of open source software. The authors discuss both internal factors (intrinsic motivation, altruism) and external rewards (future returns, personal needs) that motivate the development of open source software such as the Linux Kernel. The authors briefly discuss the history of open source software, beginning in the 1950s, when software was sold together with hardware, and macros and utilities were freely exchanged in user forums. Hars and Ou create a timeline from the 1950s until the year 2000, when Novell, Real, and other software companies released versions of their products that run on Linux. The authors also provide pie charts of respondent demographics (programmer types and highest degree earned). Hars and Ou note that the open source movement draws on diverse actors with various motivations, and cannot be attributed to the efforts of one demographic.

Kelty, Christopher M. 2008. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham: Duke University Press.
 * Kelty investigates the history and structure of the Internet with a specific focus on free software, defined as the collaborative creation of software code that is made freely available through a specific use of copyright law. He argues that the open structure of the internet can be tied to the Free Software Movement, a social movement that formally originated during the development of the GNU/Linux operating system. Kelty categorizes practitioners who participate in these types of social movements as the ‘recursive public,’responsible for reorienting power relations around modes of creation and dissemination of a massive body of virtual information. The Free Software Movement binds together lawyers, hackers, geeks, and professionals from all types of disciplines to form the recursive public that is still actively defending user’s interest in the maintenance of an open Internet.

Koehn, Phillip, Hieu Hoang, Alexandra Birch, Chris Callison-Burch, Marcello Federico, Nicola Bertoldi, Brooke Cowan et al. 2007. “Moses: Open Source Toolkit for Statistical Machine Translation.” In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting for the ACL on Interactive Poster and Demonstration Sessions, 177–80.
 * Koehn et al. describe their open source toolkit, Moses. The toolkit is used for statistical machine translation and was developed due to the perceived lack of openness in machine translation research. Moses integrates confusion network decoding and enables the tighter integration of speech recognition and machine translation than other software. Efficient data structures in Moses allow for the exploitation of larger data resources with limited hardware. The software has been downloaded over one thousand times since its release in 1 March 2007. The authors provide explanations of the factored translation model and confusion network decoding and conclude with their description of a new SMT decoder that incorporates linguistic features in a consistent and flexible framework.

Kogut, Bruce, and Anca Metiu. 2001. “Open Source Software Development and Distributed Innovation.” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 17 (2): 248–64.
 * Kogut and Metiu discuss the open source software production model as one that exploits the distributed intelligence of participants in internet communities. The authors term these broad communities as “communities of practice”. Kogut and Metiu argue that open source practices avoid the inefficiencies of a strong intellectual property regime and implement concurrent design and testing of modules, thereby saving financial and labour expenditures. Two types of open source models are examined as case studies using a chart that logs different projects, including Zope, Mozilla, MySQL, Python, KDE, GIMP, and GNOME. The authors proceed to a discussion of Linux and its history. Open source is touted as the emergence of a production model ideally suited for properties of information that can be digitally coded and distributed.

Lakhani, Karim R., and Eric Von Hippel. 2003. “How Open Source Software Works: ‘Free’ User-to-User Assistance.” Research Policy 32 (6): 923–43.
 * Lakhani and Von Hippel explore how the mundane, but necessary, task of field support is organized in the Apache web server software. They also discuss the motivations of project participants and note that the community has a strong support system. The effort expended by information providers to develop Apache returns direct learning benefits. The authors suggest that the free, voluntary labour of the open source community is often undertaken with the goal of self-education, rather than materialist concerns with capital. A brief history of Apache is provided as well as an analysis of the field support system. The study collects data on questions posted by information seekers, responses to these questions, growth in Apache web server sites, and a survey of the motivations of various respondents for undertaking such work. The authors conclude with the suggestion that it is important to analyze the micro-level functioning of successful open source projects to understand how and why they work.

Lerner, Josh, and Jean Tirole. 2002. “Some Simple Economics of Open Source.” The Journal of Industrial Economics 50 (2): 197–234.
 * Lerner and Tirole discuss the surge of interest in open source software development. The behaviour of individual programmers and commercial companies is startling and counter-intuitive to accepted theories of capitalist economics. Open source software has diffused rapidly. Examples include the Apache web server and Linux, which, as of 2002, had roughly seven to twenty million users worldwide, with a 200% annual growth rate. The authors provide a breakdown of the history of open source software, beginning with the 1950s. They provide statistics on the demographics of contributors to open source software and provide table charts of different open source programs studied in their research. Lerner and Tirole note that the development of individual components requires large teamwork and substantial capital costs. Users in mass-market industries are comparatively numerous and unsophisticated, and they deliver few services of peer recognition. Economic theories must be updated to accommodate for shifting open source software standards.

Lerner, Josh, and Jean Tirole. 2001. “The Open Source Movement: Key Research Questions.” European Economic Review 45 (4-6): 819–26.
 * Lerner and Tirole discuss the general history and cultural impact of the open source movement. The authors discuss major programs, including Linux, Apache, Sendmail, and the Perl language for writing Common Gateway Interface scripts. These programs were designed as a standard means of delivering dynamic content on the web. Lerner and Tirole point out how open source software has challenged economic paradigms of individual incentives, corporate strategies, organizational behaviour, and innovative process. They argue that, contrary to appearances, the open source movement is well accounted for by standard economic theory and point to areas for further research. The authors examine individual motivations for participating, how people assess good projects and leadership, and how these often mix commercial elements with open source programs. They conclude with discussions of why corporate bodies involve themselves with open source software, and the legal and sociological aspects and influences of the open source software movement.

Mockus, Audris, Roy T. Fielding, and James D. Herbsleb. 2002. “Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla.” ACM Transactions of Software Engineering and Methodology. 11 (3): 309–46.
 * Mockus, Fielding, and Herbsleb discuss open source software’s capacity to compete and displace traditional commercial development methods. The authors examine data from the Apache web server and Mozilla browser that includes email archives of source code change history and problem reports. The research team reports on the basic structure of the development process, the number of participants filling each of the major roles, distinctiveness of the roles, importance of core developers, and customer support in open source software. They also provide basic outlines of both Apache and Mozilla’s development histories. The study concludes with the suggestion that highly knowledgeable users should experiment in commercial environments with open work assignments in the style of open source software. Further, they argue that the developers and users, rather than a marketing management organization, should choose its new features.

Raymond, Eric S. 2001. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Beijing: O'Reilly.
 * Raymond’s manifesto for open source social politics begins with an overview of early programmers. This group of programmers assembled before the term “programmer” entered the vernacular in its present day meaning. They were heavily associated with scientific batch computing. Open source hacker culture developed out of the rise of interactive computing, which would be propagated on the ARPAnet in the early years. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon University were important centres of computer science and artificial intelligence research. Raymond details the rise of Unix software, which was considered by the commercial developers to be a group of upstarts using primitive tools. The author devotes most of his analysis to the proprietary Unix, the early free Unix, and how Linux brought hacker culture from the fringes of public consciousness to its current prominence.

Roberts, Jeffrey A., Il-Horn Hann, and Sandra A. Slaughter. 2006. “Understanding the Motivations, Participation, and Performance of Open Source Software Developers: A Longitudinal Study of the Apache Projects.” Management Science 52 (7): 984–99.
 * Roberts, Hann, and Slaughter conduct a study to understand the motivations, participation, and performance of open source software developers. The authors evaluate their model with survey and archival data collected from a longitudinal field study of software developers in the Apache projects. Payment for contributing to Apache projects is positively related to the developer’s status motivations but negatively related to use-value criteria. The authors rely heavily on psychology literature and some analysis of Apache and its contributors.

Rosen, Lawrence. 2004. Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
 * Rosen’s book on open source software licenses details the legal frameworks for open source licenses and the intellectual property rights that they are governed by. Rosen provides a definition and history of intellectual property, and definitions of freedom and open source. The following chapters include taxonomies of different license types, a discussion of academic licenses, and a chapter on the GNU general public license, which helped create a large public commons of software that is freely available to everyone worldwide. Rosen then discusses Mozilla licenses, common public licenses, IBM’s relation to open source development, and how an open source software firm can choose an open source license, as well as a guide to open standards. The appendices include the documents to which Rosen refers to throughout the monograph in order to provide additional context.

+ Rosenzweig, Roy. 2006. “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.” The Journal of American History 93 (1): 117–46.
 * Rosenzweig claims that the field of open source software development is notoriously individualistic. He notes that only six percent of over thirty-two thousand scholarly works indexed since 2000 have more than one author, and less than two percent have three or more authors. Rosenzweig argues that the cooperation and freedom of Wikipedia have transformed it into the most important demonstration of the principles of free and open source software movement. He discusses Wikipedia as both a tool for historiography as well as how it can be understood as an expression of history itself. According to the author, professional historians should pay attention to Wikipedia because students do. Wikipedia and Linux demonstrate that there are alternative models to produce encyclopaedias and software than the hierarchical, commercial model represented by Microsoft.

Schloss, Patrick D., Sarah L. Westcott, Thomas Ryabin, Justine R. Hall, Martin Hartmann, Emily B. Hollister, Ryan A. Lesniewski et al. 2009 “Introducing mothur: Open Source, Platform-Independent, Community-Supported Software for Describing and Comparing Microbial Communities.” Applied and Environmental Microbiology 75 (23): 7537–41.
 * Schloss et al. discuss mothur: their comprehensive software package that allows users to use a single piece of software to analyze community sequence data. It can be used to trim, screen, and align sequences, as well as calculate distances, assign sequences to operational taxonomic units, and describe the diversity of eight marine samples. The authors present a table that outlines the features of the software. They also provide a flow chart of the number of tags sampled. In the future, the team hopes to develop computational tools to describe and analyze microbial communities. The authors note that although mothur goes a long way towards improving the efficiency of data analysis, researchers should still take care to ensure that their experiments are well designed and thought out and that their results are biologically plausible.

Truscello, Michael. 2003. “The Architecture of Information: Open Source Software and Tactical Poststructuralist Anarchism.” Postmodern Culture 13 (1): n.p. http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.503/13.3truscello.html.
 * Truscello examines the discourse of computer programming through Eric Raymond’s ethnographical account of the open source software development model. He notes that open source is a tactical political philosophy. He analyzes the points of convergence between the history and philosophy of software development alongside poststructuralist thought. For Truscello, the internet is emblematic of both the apotheosis of the surveillance society and the dream of anarchistic autonomy. This space is being increasingly encroached upon by multinational post-industrial capitalism. The open source movement can create an anarchic space for tactical intervention in the surveillance and can control society by making the code visible to the greatest number of people. Truscello concludes by noting that cultural theorists have neglected the work of discourse analysis and practices that shape computer programmers and their code.

Von Hippel, Eric, and Georg Von Krogh. 2003. “Open Source Software and the ‘Private-Collective’ Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science.” Organization Science 14 (2): 209–23.
 * Von Hippel and Von Krogh discuss what they see as the two models of innovation in organization science: the private investment model, which assumes returns to the innovator result from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection, and the collective action model, which operates with the assumption that under conditions of market failure, innovators collaborate in order to produce public goods. The authors provide a brief history of open source software and include a list of a few case studies. Von Hippel and Von Krogh take these projects as examples of the private-collective innovation models for the industry. The authors conclude with the suggestion that interpretation of subtle matter in organizational science will be aided by contextual and behavioural understanding of project activities, as well as a broad set of data and methods.

Von Krogh, Georg, Sebastian Spaeth, and Karim R. Lakhani. 2003. “Community, Joining, and Specialization in Open Source Software Innovation: A Case Study.” Research Policy 32 (7): 1217–41.
 * Von Krogh, Spaeth, and Lakhani develop an inductive theory of the open source software innovation process. They focus on the creation of Freenet, which is a project that aims to develop a decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer electronic file-sharing network. They analyze data from multiple sources documenting the Freenet software development process and propose relationships among joining script, specialization, contribution barriers, and feature gifts. The authors provide a reference model and graphical overview of the Freenet architecture, as well as a diagram that evaluates project size based on email activity. In conclusion, the authors have noted that there are no empirical studies or solid theory building on the social aspects of software development.

Von Krogh, Georg, and Eric Von Hippel. 2006. “The Promise of Research on Open Source Software.” Management Science 52 (7): 975–83.
 * Von Krogh and Von Hippel discuss how the open source phenomenon has developed utility for research findings in many fields. Research is categorized into three areas: motivations for open source software projects; governance, organization, and the process of innovation in open source software projects; and competitive dynamics enforced by open source software. The authors create a table chart that amalgamates all available research (as of 2006) on open source software. They break this table into research focuses, special issues, and contributions. Open source software contributors have created a new economic model that can spread to other areas of economic and social activity. The authors express pride in having published some of the studies related to open source software.

Weber, Steven. 2004. The Success of Open Source. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
 * Weber’s book-length study surveys the success of software and source code that is freely distributed. He discusses how property underpins the social organization of cooperation and production in the digital era, and how older models of production can no longer be followed in the advent of the success of systems such as Linux and Apache. The success of open source software in this highly competitive industry subverts several assumptions about how software firms should be run, as well as the distribution and circulation of product. Weber discusses the history of open source in addition to basic definitions of the field and its methods of distribution, circulation, and production. The interactions between open source software and the disciplines of business and law are also examined, with Weber suggesting that these have all changed drastically with the advent of open source code distribution.

West, Joel. 2003. “How Open is Open Enough?: Melding Proprietary and Open Source Platform Strategies.” Research Policy 32 (7) 1259–85.
 * West discusses how computer platforms provide integrated architectures for hardware and software standards. He examines both proprietary and open source strategies––the extremes of software development. The personal computer brings horizontal platform control, which is arguably more efficient than the vertically integrated structure because it allows the producer of each layer to serve the broadest possible market according to economies of scale. A table that indicates ownership of architectural layers for representative computer platforms as of 1990 is provided. West also evaluates the development of Unix, and how both the open source market and rival firms responded to the Microsoft challenge. The study concludes with a suggestion that the hybrid open source strategies of proprietary platform vendors are more suited to current market conditions and further discussion is needed on how open-standards affect commercial firms.

West, Joel, and Scott Gallagher. 2006. “Challenges of Open Innovation: The Paradox of Firm Investment in Open Source Software.” R&D Management 36 (3): 319-331.
 * West and Gallagher discuss open innovation for the generation, capture, and employment of intellectual property within and by firms. Firms need to find creative ways to exploit internal innovation and incorporate external innovation into its developments. Additionally, they need to find ways to motivate outsiders to supply an ongoing stream of external innovations to supplement their own developments. The paradox is that rival firms could easily manipulate these innovations. However, pooled research, product development, spinouts, selling complements, and attracting donated complements are suggested as strategies to tackle the challenges created by the development of open source software for traditional firms. The authors note that more studies need to be conducted on virtual teams, cultural openness, technological modularization, and public/private collaboration.