Recent Evolution of OSS Resources

Evolution of Open Source Software provides a selection of literature about the origins of OSS, and given the evolutionary nature of the OSS movement, recent changes are also covered.

 

Simon Phipps, Sun Microsystems Chief Open Source Officer, from an essay “Free Speech and Free Beer: The Evolution of Open Source in a Massively Connected World” written in 2002:states:

An online book freely available, “Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution” was first published in January 1999.

It includes chapters that have become classics of the Open Source literature:

A Brief History of Hackerdom” (Eric S. Raymond)

 

The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric S. Raymond is one of the most quoted essays about the management of an Open Source project. Wikipedia summarises its content as follows:

 

“The essay contrasts two different free software development models”:

In 2001, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, gave an 85 minute presentation at the Computer History Museum in California. It is an interactive story with several interventions from the public and examples of good humour. It is worth viewing Torvalds, -then 31 years old, and ten years after starting Linux, presenting the evolution of Linux as something he sees as natural.

The GNU operating system is a complete free software system, upward-compatible with UNIX. The initial announcement of the GNU Project was made by Richard Stallman in 1983. Read the official overview of the evolution since then.

That's the title of a brief article (2008) that presents the five things that Torvalds has learned from managing the most successful Open Source project: Linux. They are:

-Find people you can trust

-Be trustworthy yourself

-Be honest, sometimes painfully honest

-You also have to let the others get their say

-A combination of bluntness and honesty leads to the best code ending up in Linux

Sandeep Krishnamurthy identified in this paper (2005) a number of important FLOSS contributions

 

In brief, the contributions are

  1. Kevin Crowston describes new lines of inquiry from the perspective of the social organization of projects.

John Mark Walker wrote an article "There is no Open Source Community" in 2006 where he argued that the growth of the Open Source Software is due to the internet which allowed the economies of scale to succeed. He points that the trends that result in cheap software commodities will maintain their expansion, so will the Open Source footprint and that the view that there is "a core group of altruistic companies and true believers driving Open Source forward is simply false".

The Linux operating system is the most successful Open Source project in history, but just how much is the software in a Linux distribution "worth"? The Linux Foundation did a study about the Fedora 9 Linux Distribution, released in 2008 and estimated that it would take $10.8 billion to develop the distribution "by traditional proprietary means in 2008 dollars".

Federico Iannacci from the London School of Economics has been studying the coordination of Open Source projects for many years.