Much of the impetus for the free and open software movement arose as a reaction to legal issues related to software licensing. Consequently, questions concerning what is commonly called intellectual property have been a habitual feature of the open source landscape. Intellectual property includes creations like copyrighted works, patented inventions, and proprietary software. The purpose of this chapter is to survey some of the relevant legal issues in this domain in an accessible manner informative for understanding their relevance to free and open development. The legal and business mechanisms that have been developed to protect intellectual property are intended to address the core objective of protecting creations in order to provide appropriate incentives for innovators. Traditionally, such protection has been accomplished through exclusion. For example, under copyright law, one is not allowed to distribute a copyrighted work without the authorization of the owner of the copyright. The General Public License (GPL) that lies at the heart of the free software movement takes an unconventional perspective on the use of copyright. It focuses not on how to exclude others from using your work, but on how to preserve the free and open distribution of your work when you do allow others to modify and redistribute it (Weber, 2004). We will consider the basic legal concepts associated with intellectual property and how they have been brought to bear in the open source movement.

This chapter looks at open source development from an economic and business point of view. We have two objectives. One is to understand the economic matrix in which open source development operates, what characteristic economic factors affect its viability, and what proven business models have been established. The other objective is to consider some of the classic motivational questions about why people do open development from an economic perspective. Some standard economic factors we consider are the influence of vendor lock-in, network effects (or network externalities), the total cost of use of software, the impact of licensing on business models, the potential for customizability for open source versus proprietary products, implications of complementary products, and the effect of commoditization. We also examine some of the successful open source business models that have evolved over time. The longstanding question about open business models is basically how can people make money off a product that is given away for free? Who pays for the cost of developing this software? We consider various approaches that have proved successful, including dual licensing, consultation on open source products, provision of open source software (OSS) distributions and related services, and hybrid business models like the use of open source for in-house development or horizontally in a strategic synergistic combination with proprietary products such as in the case of IBM's involvement with the Apache Foundation and Linux.

Open source development is a form of distributed, collaborative, asynchronous, partly volunteer, software development. A new paradigm for cooperation like this invariably introduces new questions about its social characteristics and its affects on human behavior. Matters of interest range from the characteristics of the participants (demographic, motivational, etc.), the social psychology of their interactions, and the effectiveness of their cooperative processes, to the cognitive and problem-solving side effects of this kind of development. The purpose of this chapter is to survey these issues and identify some of the scientific and social concepts that can help in understanding them. We believe these social science perspectives can help provide a conceptual framework for better understanding open development. We will begin by considering the basic demographics of the phenomenon: the characteristics of the developer population, the motivations of developers and community participants, how participants interact, the diversity of projects, and so on. The survey by Kim (2003) is one of a number of useful surveys that have been done on these issues. We also examine relevant concepts from the field of social psychology, including the classic notions of norms and roles, factors that affect group interactions like compliance, internalization, identification and normative influence, the impact of power relationships and group cohesion, and the application of these concepts to open development. There are other useful abstractions available from cognitive science, such as the cognitive biases that affect group interactions and problem solving.

We use the term open source platform to refer to the combination of open operating systems and desktops, support environments like GNU, and underlying frameworks like the X Window System, which together provide a matrix for user interaction with a computer system. The provision of such an open infrastructure for computing has been one of the hallmark objectives of the free software movement. The GNU project sponsored by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) had as its ultimate objective the creation of a self-contained free software platform that would allow computer scientists to accomplish all their software development in a free environment uninhibited by proprietary restrictions. This chapter describes these epic achievements in the history of computing, including the people involved and technical and legal issues that affected the development. We shall also examine the important free desktop application GIMP which is intended as a free replacement for Adobe Photoshop. We shall reserve the discussion of the GNU project itself to a later chapter.

The root system that serves as the reference model for open source operating systems is Unix whose creation and evolution we shall briefly describe. Over time, legal and proprietary issues associated with Unix opened the door to Linux as the signature open source operating system, though major free versions of Unix continued under the BSD (Berkeley Software Distributions) aegis.

The public sector is uniquely important to the success of open source for a number of reasons. It offers well-suited opportunities for open development, in domains ranging from technological infrastructure, science, and innovation to national security and education. Furthermore, not only do public agencies and society benefit from the use of open products, the public sector, through its role in policy formulation, also provides a vehicle for advocating the expanded use of open software in society. To appreciate the opportunities, consider some of the roles the public sector plays. It has a central position in supporting the maintenance and evolution of technological infrastructure for society, an area where open software has proven extremely successful. It has also historically played an extensive role in promoting innovation in science and technology. For example, the government was the leader in funding the development of the Internet with its myriad of underlying open software components. Thus, clearly, public investment in open development has paid dramatic dividends in the past and can be expected to continue to do so in the future. The public sector is also where decisions on national economic objectives and strategy are made. These decisions, whether of a legal, legislative, or policy-driven character, can significantly affect the expansion of open source use within the government or by the public at large. The public sector is broadly charged with responsibilities from education to national security, domains that are particularly compatible with the characteristics of open source.

The open source movement is a worldwide attempt to promote an open style of software development more aligned with the accepted intellectual style of science than the proprietary modes of invention that have been characteristic of modern business. The idea – or vision – is to keep the scientific advances created by software development openly available for everyone to understand and improve upon. Perhaps even more so than in the conventional scientific paradigm, the very process of creation in open source is highly transparent throughout. Its products and processes can be continuously, almost instantaneously scrutinized over the Internet, even retrospectively. Its peer review process is even more open than that of traditional science. But most of all: its discoveries are not kept secret and it lets anyone, anywhere, anytime free to build on its discoveries and creations.

Open source is transparent. The source code itself is viewable and available to study and comprehend. The code can be changed and then redistributed to share the changes and improvements. It can be executed for any purpose without discrimination. Its process of development is largely open, with the evolution of free and open systems typically preserved in repositories accessible via the Internet, including archives of debates on the design and implementation of the systems and the opinions of observers about proposed changes. Open source differs vastly from proprietary code where all these transparencies are generally lacking. Proprietary code is developed largely in private, albeit its requirements are developed with its prospective constituencies.

The story of free and open software is a scientific adventure, packed with extraordinary, larger-than-life characters and epic achievements. From infrastructure for the Internet to operating systems like Linux, this movement involves some of the great accomplishments in computing over the past quarter century. The story encompasses technological advances, global software collaboration on an unprecedented scale, and remarkable software tools for facilitating distributed development. It involves innovative business models, voluntary and corporate participation, and intriguing legal questions. Its achievements have had widespread impact in education and government, as well as historic cultural and commercial consequences. Some of its attainments occurred before the Internet's rise, but it was the Internet's emergence that knitted together the scientific bards of the open source community. It let them exchange their innovations and interact almost without regard to constraints of space, time, or national boundary. Our story recounts the tales of major open community projects: Web browsers that fueled and popularized the Internet, the long dominant Apache Web server, the multifarious development of Unix, the near-mythical rise of Linux, desktop environments like GNOME, fundamental systems like those provided by the Free Software Foundation's GNU project, infrastructure like the X Window System, and more. We will encounter creative, driven scientists who are often bold, colorful entrepreneurs or eloquent scientific spokesmen. The story is not without its conflicts, both internal and external to the movement.

This chapter attempts to present a balanced view of what the future seems likely to hold for the open source movement based on past and present trends and the underlying structural, social, political, scientific, and economic forces at work. We will first sketch what we believe are the likely dominant modes for software development and then we will elaborate on the rationales for our projections.

First of all, we believe the open source paradigm is moving inexorably toward worldwide domination of computer software infrastructure. Its areas of dominance seem likely to include not only the network and its associated utilities, but also operating systems, desktop environments, and the standard office utilities. Significantly, it seems that precisely the most familiar and routine applications will become commoditized and satisfied by open source implementations, facilitating pervasive public recognition of the movement. The software products whose current dominance seems likely to decline because of this transformation include significant components of the Microsoft environment from operating systems to office software.

However, despite a likely widespread increase in the recognition, acceptance, and use of open source, this does not imply that open software will dominate the entire universe of software applications. The magnitude of financial resources available to proprietary developers is enormous and increasing, giving such corporations a huge advantage in product development. One might note, for example, that expenditures on research and development by publicly traded software companies increased tenfold between 1986 and 2000, from 1 to 10% of industrial research expenditures (Evans, 2002).

The free software movement emerged in the early 1980s at a time when the ARPANET network with its several hundred hosts was well-established and moving toward becoming the Internet. The ARPANET already allowed exchanges like e-mail and FTP, technologies that significantly facilitated distributed collaboration, though the Internet was to amplify this ability immensely. The TCP/IP protocols that enabled the Internet became the ARPANET standard on January 1, 1983. As a point of reference, recall that the flagship open source GNU project was announced by Richard Stallman in early 1983. By the late 1980s the NSFNet backbone network merged with the ARPANET to form the emerging worldwide Internet. The exponential spread of the Internet catalyzed further proliferation of open source development. This chapter will describe some of the underlying enabling technologies of the open source paradigm, other than the Internet itself, with an emphasis on the centralized Concurrent Versions System (CVS) versioning system as well as the newer decentralized BitKeeper and Git systems that are used to manage the complexities of distributed open development. We also briefly discuss some of the well-known Web sites used to host and publicize open projects and some of the services they provide.

The specific communications technologies used in open source projects have historically tended to be relatively lean: e-mail, mailing lists, newsgroups, and later on Web sites, Internet Relay Chat, and forums. Most current activity takes place on e-mail mailing lists and Web sites (Feller and Fitzgerald, 2002).

The Open Source Initiative represents the formalization of one stream of the free and open software movement. We have described its establishment in 1998 by Raymond and Perens, and Peterson's coinage of the term open source as an alternative to what was thought to be the more ideologically laden phrase free software. Of course, ever since the mid-1980s, the other distinct stream of the movement represented by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU project had already been active. The FSF and Richard Stallman initiated the free software concept, defined its terms, vigorously and boldly publicized its motivations and objectives, established and implemented the core GNU project, and led advocacy and compliance for the free software movement. They have been instrumental in its burgeoning success. We have already discussed the FSF's General Public License (GPL) in Chapter 6. This chapter describes the origin and technical objectives of the GNU project that represents one of the major technical triumphs of the free software movement. We also elaborate on some of the responsibilities, activities, and philosophical principles of the FSF, particularly as expressed by FSF General Counsel Eben Moglen.

The GNU project

The GNU project was founded to create a self-contained free software platform. The project was begun in 1983 by Stallman. It had an ambitious and arguably almost utopian vision. The acronym GNU stands for “GNU's Not Unix,” a kind of recursive acronym that was popular at MIT where Stallman worked.

This chapter describes a number of open source applications related to the Internet that are intended to introduce the reader unfamiliar with the world of open development to some of its signature projects, ideas, processes, and people. These projects represent remarkable achievements in the history of technology and business. They brought about a social and communications revolution that transformed society, culture, commerce, technology, and even science. The story of these classic developments as well as those in the next chapter is instructive in many ways: for learning how the open source process works, what some of its major accomplishments have been, who some of the pioneering figures in the field are, how projects have been managed, how people have approached development in this context, what motivations have led people to initiate and participate in such projects, and what some of the business models are that have been used for commercializing associated products.

Web servers and Web browsers are at the heart of the Internet and free software has been prominent on both the server and browser ends. Thus the first open source project we will investigate is a server, the so-called National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Web server developed by Rob McCool in the mid-1990s. His work had in turn been motivated by the then recent creation by Tim Berners-Lee of the basic tools and concepts for a World Wide Web (WWW), including the invention of the first Web server and browser, HTML (the Hypertext Markup Language), and the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol).