Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat wrote an article about how Open Source drives innovation faster due to its collaborative nature and community-backed effort. “Teaching Open Source encourages better communication between students and prevents them from working in a vacuum, void of input and teamwork. Classrooms become smaller communities within the larger Open Source community”. In “Open Source: Narrowing the Divides between Education, Business and Community”
A lecture at Free Software, Germany (2000) of Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford.. The paper is also a chapter of the book “Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software” by Feller et al., MIT Press (2005)
“It is a production process built around an unconventional understanding of property rights” says Steven Weber, from the University of California at Berkeley, in his short paper with a long title: “Is the Open Source Software Process Sui Generis to Software or a More General Way of Organising the Production of Complex Knowledge Products?”
A short slide presentation by Michael Sparks from BBC Research and Development (2005) which covers why the BBC is using OSS and how it approaches software licensing.
This paper from the University of California, Davis, USA, which compares how the structured organisation of a commercial software project (an organisational “cathedral”), contrasts with the self-organising “bazaar” structure of the OSS projects. It approaches the issue from a social network perspective, its General Terms are “Human Factors”, “Measurement”, “Management”.
Participating in an open source software community can initially seem an intimidating prospect. However, such communities are ultimately composed of people, with all the virtues and foibles of people everywhere. Pre-conceptions should be avoided. Open source software communities are rarely populated entirely by highly technical individuals proud to call themselves hackers. Nor are they composed entirely of certified software engineers.
This guide is for helping people to understand how to and how not to engage with community over projects such as software, content, marketing, art, infrastructure, standards, and so forth. It contains knowledge distilled from years of Red Hat experience.
