[Air-l] The Cathedral and the Bazaar

[Karim R. Lakhani]

This is "the" seminal article which helped articulate free and open
source software development.  It is a very interesting read. Not every
one in the hacker community would agree with what he says but it
provides a grounded practitioner view with regards to how software gets
developed and supported within the hacker community.

Academic research on free/open source software is picking up steam.  I,
along with Eric von Hippel, run the Free/Open Source Software Research
Community website at MIT http://opensource.mit.edu or if you prefer
http://freesoftware.mit.edu. We have over 30 working papers (and
growing) from many different perspectives (economic, sociological,
management, policy etc.) from scholars from around the world --
available for download.  You can find the papers here
http://opensource.mit.edu/online_papers.php 

There is also a research directory and a discussion list for those
interested in the research side of things.

Finally, I, along with colleagues from BCG, presented a survey of
motivations and effort in the open source community two weeks ago.  The
presentation can be found here http://osdn.com/bcg/  It provides a
snapshot of the individuals writing all this great software.

This phenomenon is very interesting, my dissertation is in this area and
should be of general interest to folks on AIR.

ciao,

K

-- 
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Karim R. Lakhani
MIT Sloan School of Management
MIT Open Source Research Project
e-mail: lakhani at mit.edu
voice:  617-851-1224
fax:    617-344-0403
http://opensource.mit.edu
http://mit.edu/lakhani/www
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