Cory Doctorow writes far superior op-ed pieces than fiction, and this one in The Guardian is a beautiful eulogy for the music industry. The music industry has struck a Faustian pact with ISPs to monitor copyright infringements, violating privacy and probably doing itself no favors with the public or its shareholders.

What it needs to do is simply work out an all-you-can-eat license for the ISPs that they could pass on to their customers. I’d happily have $10 or more added to my monthly cable Internet bill so that I have the ability to freely download songs. I currently buy them “by the drink” on iTunes, but a blanket license would be easier.

It would also return control to the music labels, control that they’ve ceded to Apple.

Cory writes:

Under the new scheme, the rule of law is replaced by a cosy inter-industry deal. Whereas before, anyone who wanted your ISP to spy on your world wide web connection would have had to show evidence to a judge and get a court order, now any joker who claims to be an aggrieved copyright holder can do so.

… Source:The Open Road

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Joel West, professor at San Jose Say University College of Business, and Siobhán O’Mahony, professor at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, have produced some insightful research over the years. However, I particularly like a new academic study the two recently released: “The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities.” It studies why developers contribute to certain open-source projects and don’t contribute to others.

The key? If you want outside participation, you need to deliver more than mere transparency: Developers need to be able to change the direction of the project to make it worthwhile to stick around. (For a swift example of how too much control can stifle a community, take a look at Sun and OpenOffice.)

This isn’t surprising, but the research is helpful in detailing why this is so, and how firms cope with it. While most open-source projects attract tiny to no outside developer interest, corporate-sponsored open-source projects start with an implicit handicap by demanding control of the destinies of their projects:

By comparing the participation architectures that resulted from sponsors’ design decisions, we identified two types of openness: transparency and accessibility [”Accessibility allows external participants to directly influence the direction of the community to meet their specific wants and needs”].

While transparency offered potential contributors the capability to follow and understand a community’s production efforts, accessibility determined the degree to which external contributors could influence that production. In designing a community, sponsors were more apt to offer transparency than they were to offer accessibility to external community members.

… Source:The Open Road

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Last week I asked for more case studies, and I heard back from a range of companies that recently had significant customer wins. In an effort to spread the good word, here are a few new places that open source is releasing customers from the shackles of proprietary lock-in:

• LinkedIn has selected Sun’s MySQL database

… Source:The Open Road

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Joel West, professor at San Jose State University College of Business, and Siobhán O’Mahony, professor at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, have produced some insightful research over the years. However, I particularly like a new academic study the two recently released: “The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities.” It studies why developers contribute to certain open-source projects and don’t contribute to others.

The key? If you want outside participation, you need to deliver more than mere transparency: Developers need to be able to change the direction of the project to make it worthwhile to stick around. (For a quick example of how too much control can stifle a community, take a look at Sun and OpenOffice.)

This is not surprising, but the research is helpful in detailing why this is so, and how firms cope with it. While most open-source projects attract little to no outside developer interest, corporate-sponsored open-source projects begin with an implicit handicap by demanding control of the destinies of their projects:

By comparing the participation architectures that resulted from sponsors’ design decisions, we identified two types of openness: transparency and accessibility [”Accessibility grants external participants to directly influence the direction of the community to meet their specific wants and needs”].

While transparency offered potential contributors the ability to follow and comprehend a community’s production efforts, accessibility determined the degree to which external contributors could influence that production. In designing a community, sponsors were more prone to offer transparency than they were to offer accessibility to external community members.

… Source:The Open Road

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