
Contents
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“Clean Arrangements”: The Dream of Property Rights “Clean Arrangements”: The Dream of Property Rights
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Crystals Turned to Mud: The Problem with Property Crystals Turned to Mud: The Problem with Property
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Beyond Property Rights: The Author and the Machine Beyond Property Rights: The Author and the Machine
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The Birth of Cyberlaw The Birth of Cyberlaw
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The Microsoft Problem The Microsoft Problem
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The Creation of the Open Source Idea The Creation of the Open Source Idea
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Slashdot and “Code Is Law” Slashdot and “Code Is Law”
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Conclusion Conclusion
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6 Open Source, the Expressive Programmer, and the Problem of Property
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Published:December 2010
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Abstract
This chapter looks at the open source software movement in the 1990s, which represented a rather sudden and dramatic transformation of dominant managerial principles in the high-tech industries. By 1998, companies such as Apple, IBM, and Netscape were investing heavily in open source software projects, actions that only a year or two earlier would have been considered laughably irrational. While there were economic conditions behind this, principally the Microsoft monopoly, economic forces alone cannot explain why the shift happened when it did. The chapter shows how the shift was enabled by a rearticulation of the romantic construction of computing through a retelling of the story of computer-programming-as-art that situated the narrative against, rather than for, the commodification of code. The effect of Eric Raymond's “Cathedral and Bazaar” essay and the spread of the rhetoric of open source associated with the Open Source Initiative were conditioned upon a widely experienced tension between the experiences of creating software and using computers, and the structures of reward and industrial organization that emerged from commodified software; the same romanticism that had fueled free market visions earlier in the decade was now marshaled against them.
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