51
theory on demand
The interaction between ‘free’ methods of development and the net economy at large would lead, in the years following 2YK, to an explosion of the number of ‘Open Source’ products as well as to heated political debates around software patenting, digital property rights and generally about ethically and politically acceptable norms of ‘intellectual property’ management. Google was very much involved in the rocky history of F/OSS, but only because it adopted, like many other dynamic and innovative firms, the F/OSS methods in order to pursue its ‘mission’. The contiguity between F/OSS and Google is one of place and of time. A number of important free software projects saw their light at Stanford University in 1998, just as Brin and Page were putting the last hand on the first version of their search engine. Think for instance of SND and ‘Protégé’, which both would become extremely successful in their respective digital domains (audio and semantic web). It is no surprise that Brin and Page, influenced by the Stanford hacker culture, were to have a preference for the GNU/Linux development platform. Even though there are significant differences between Free Software and Open Source, there are also many common elements and shared viewpoints. For the sake of clarity, we will use the term /’Open Source’/ ‘F/OSS’, for Free and/or Open Source Software to refer to the phenomenon of embracing Free Software, Open Source software and its manifestations as competitive element in the IT market. The first characteristic of a F/OSS community consist of adopting working methods that are open to the collaboration of all comers, meaning that it will potentially accept spontaneous input and interaction from any party that is involved in the creation of digital artifacts, be it a coder, a programmer, or even an ordinary user. In the hacker jargon, this approach has been described as the ‘bazaar’ model and its widespread acceptance can be attributed to the way in which the Linux kernel was developed in the beginning of the nineties. This project, initiated by Linus Torvalds, forms the basis of all GNU/Linux distros (distributions: software suites, often a whole operating system). The new co-operation techniques developed by the digital underground dispatched Brook’s infamous law, which up to now had been the bane of IT projects’ development teams. Following Brook’s law, which predicates that the number of errors grows exponentially as complexity and lines of codes increase, it seems inevitable that a project in which thousands of developers participate must end up in a chaos of unstable code and innumerable bugs. However, contrary to what was to be expected, the publication of the source code, and the free circulation of documentation on the Internet, together with the co-operation and spontaneous feedback of an ever growing number of participants, have enabled F/OSS communities to demonstrate that it was possible to considerably improve the development of digital artifacts, both process– and results wise. Software developed this way is usually shipped under a General Public License (‘GPL’), leading to ‘viral’ distribution of products under copyleft. Despite the fact that the GPL license does not restrict commercial use, it has often been superseded by ‘diluted’ variants; similar to what happened with ‘Free Software’ when its emphasis on freedom