Free software reading group (Fall 2008)

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?”)

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.  

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).

Anthropological perspectives

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.