The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source

Bruce Perens is a seminal figure in the open source movement. Indeed, he helped coin the very term Open Source, and wrote the original Open Source Definition. He has been instrumental in many open source initiatives, such as the Linux Standard Base. He is editor of the Bruce Perens Open Source Series, published by Prentice Hall, and was recently named Senior Scientist for Open Source by the Cyber Security Policy Research Laboratory of George Washington University.

In this talk, Perens will consider the economics of Open Source. Says Perens: Many people don't understand how Open Source could be sustainable, some may even feel that its effect upon the proprietary software industry is an economic detriment. Fortunately, if you look more deeply into the economic function of software in general, it's easy to establish that Open Source is both sustainable and of tremendous benefit to the overall economy. Open Source can be explained entirely within the context of conventional open-market economics. Indeed, it turns out that it has much stronger ties to the phenomenon of capitalism than you may have appreciated.