Researching The Open Source Way

A reader writes: "Eugene Eric Kim, who also writes on the webservices channel on DevChannel.org, has posted a research report on open source communities. The two projects/communities studied were Touchgraph and Squirrelmail, examining how they work together." Looking at it, I think the research report was sponsored by The Omidyar Foundation, who are the EBay founders; and the report is also licensed under the Creative Commons license.

Comments

What this reminds me of ...

[timothy]

is the continuing copyright-extension fight.

In the future, responsible academics and other researchers will all attach liberal-use licenses (hopefully ones putting the documents into the public domain or similar) to such research documents, so that they're not still under onerous restrictions 80 years (or, say, 99) after the study has been done. Maybe there is some exception (though none spring to mind) where a company / organization believes that it will be able to benefit substantially by withholding such research, but I think there's a far greater possibility for gaining goodwill by acknowledging that for many / most / nearly-all / note-how-much-I'm conceding-here copyrighted materials, the current slouch toward Forever is at best silly and often worse.

timothy

A fascinating article

[jd]

I'm a little suspicious that it might be steered a little -too- pro-Open Source, but that's another matter.

The most interesting part of this article is that it is reasonably open, itself. The main reason that companies "own" a lot of Intellectual Property is that they either sponsor it in a University, where all the smart people are, or they buy it from the University later. Or, in some cases, just steal it and hope nobody notices.

If there is now a grassroots movement to start publishing at least some core research under free or free-ish licenses, then this can't happen. However, there's not a lot the companies can do about it.

I'm going to guess that one article isn't going to scare anyone. BUT, if we see more and more free/free-ish papers, especially peer-reviewed, then the situation may change. Universities don't pay their employees much (!!) at present, so selling their souls to private companies is often the only way to eke out a living for researchers and lecturers.

Now, if we take away an entire chunk of that chain, what happens? The researchers still need to eat, but their work is now usable and verifiable by anyone. They're not going to get paid by companies for something that's open, as the company can't patent that. Never mind they can still make money, they won't see it that way. Too blinkered by far.

So where to the academics get their money? From the University, if the University wants to retain any staff. In turn, this means that the Universities will need to get more cash. They can't charge students much more than they do, so that means they'll be forced to demand - yes, demand, not ask - for more money from State and Federal Government. The threat? No cash, no school.

Instead of treating schools as something to be kicked around, and maybe paid a few cents to keep them quiet, you'll (slowly) start to see budgets for education move out of single digit dollars and become closer to being on-par with other sectors.

Ok, this may seem like a massive leap. Where's my proof? The British system, and all the changes it has been through in the past 30-40 years, shows one thing very clearly. Education is bistable. It can EITHER operate through sponsorship from companies, OR through grants from Government.

Universities don't generate revenue, per se, they merely generate the MEANS to generate revenue. As such, they will always cost more than they can directly obtain, but they will ALWAYS be far more profitable to support than to let rot.

If, as I hope, this is the start of a trend to make academia truly open and unencumbered, then companies won't be interested. They can't control the product, they can't even control the institute. AT&T found that out, with the BSD tapes. Berkeley simply re-wrote them.

Here's hoping that one nail in the coffin of the corporate power-block has finally been hammered into place.