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Open Source Movement

The open source movement refers to a movement of people who believe in the mass coordination of content providers to jointly produce an information-based product and make it freely available to the general public. The use of the product is frequently limited in that any changes or improvements are required to also be made freely available to the public. Although the advent of computer-mediated communication has thrust the open source movement to the popular forefront only in the past two decades with the popularity of open source software products such as Linux, similar communities of information contributors started organizing in the mid-1800s with the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) using the coordinated effort of thousands of volunteers. This entry explains the history of the open source movement, its structure of organizing work, the various domains where the open source movement has had impact on the organization of work, and the future direction of the movement.

History of the Open Source Movement

Although it took approximately 70 years for the coordination of a worldwide pool of thousands of volunteers to produce the first OED, it took fewer than 10 years for similar such communities to produce complete computer operating systems. The modern software incarnation is rooted in two major efforts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Berkeley. Richard Stallman, formerly of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, created a nonprofit organization that promotes free software development and usage called the Free Software Foundation and developed GNU (a base of the modern-day Linux operating system).

Stallman later coined the term copyleft, which, instead of restricting usage of an information product, enhances consumer rights around modifying intellectual property. Bill Jolitz, of the Computer Science Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, released the free BSD Unix operating system. Many of the software products of the movement were relatively unknown outside the computer programmer community until a computer science student in Finland named Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel. This kernel helped popularize Stallman's GNU and draw attention to the broader movement. When an internal Microsoft strategy document, later named the Halloween Documents, was leaked to the media detailing the competitive threat of Linux, the open source movement started to receive extensive popular press coverage presenting its output as a direct competitor to Microsoft's Windows operating system. The concept of open source was formalized with the creation of the Open Source Initiative by Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens in 1998. The media coverage, along with a deeper understanding and formalization of the community method of organizing work, led to the flourishing of the movement in many realms, both in software development and in other information-based products.

The C-Form

The majority of work conducted by the open source movement is organized in the Community Form (C-form) organizational architecture. A C-form has four primary organizing principles. First, it is designed with informal peripheral boundaries where content contributors are free to come and go as they please. When they would like to participate, they do. When they prefer not to, they do not. The boundaries are almost entirely fluid. Second, C-forms rely on content contributors to volunteer their labor. Although some contributors may gain individually from such contributions through employment relationships with classically organized employers who have deemed relationship with a C-form as beneficial to the organization, many do not. Third, C-forms produce an information-based product. The method of organizing relies upon the fundamental principle that the product can be copied without cost, which currently is possible only with information-based products. Fourth, C-forms rely on open sharing of knowledge. The majority of information produced and communication around the creation of such information is widely open for all contributors and consumers to see. The primary limitation on open sharing is around internal governance issues, with some C-forms keeping major administrative decisions open only to select high-level contributors.

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