GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION The Politics of Open Source

This is the second special issue of JITP that features selected and peer-reviewed submissions from a thematic conference, sponsored by the journal. The first sponsored conference and subsequent special issue, entitled “YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States” (JITP 2010, vol. 7, nos. 2–3) was a relatively confined topic from the perspective of technology and politics. The choice of “The Politics of Open Source” as a central theme for our second conference and this special issue cast a comparatively wider net in terms of possible interpretations of the subject and its meaning as it is related to politics. The papers that we received reflected a truly diverse and interdisciplinary approach to the study of technology and politics, a portion of which are included in this volume. But before I describe the papers chosen for this issue, I think it is important to provide introductory information about “open source”— particularly for those readers unfamiliar with the phrase. At its heart, open source in software development seeks to provide users with access to readable software code, instead of just the unreadable compiled software that can be run. The actual idea of sharing computer code dates back to the very early days of computing. For example, in the 1950s, IBM established a “share” user group in an effort to pool software development (Campbell-Kelly, 2003). In the 1960s, IBM and other large-scale computer manufacturers often sold their machines with “free” software preinstalled, meaning that the readable source code was included and available. This gave users the ability to improve and modify the code if they so desired. In this era, hardware was the commodity being sold, not the software that ran on it (Muffatto, 2006). In addition, in the 1960s and 1970s, programmers at academic institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed practices of software sharing and collaborative production (Levy, 1984), and this practice grew as the Internet spread (Tuomi, 2002). However, in the 1970s and into the 1980s, practices changed. Computer and software firms increasingly treated the software programs they developed as commercial, proprietary products. Software was shipped to the customer with copyright licenses that placed restrictions on the number of computers on which the software could be installed. Moreover, the readable software—the proprietary source code logic— was not included in the shrink-wrapped packages; only the unreadable “runtime” software was provided to the end-user. In the article that follows this introduction, John Sullivan describes the emergence of the “Free Software Movement” in response to this trend toward closed, proprietary software. Sullivan’s article is a nice start to this issue, for it summarizes the efforts of computer programmer Richard Stallman to articulate important freedoms that should be attached to all software, including the freedom to study how the program works and the right to improve the program. Both of these freedoms require the source to be available, readable, and openly accessible. Sullivan also describes the great innovation