Open Source
From The New Media Embed Program Fall08
Open Source is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the production and design process for various goods, products, resources and technical conclusions or advice. Most commonly used to refer to a program in which the source code is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design free of charge. Open source offers accessibility to the source of the product or good. Some people consider it to be one of several design approaches while others consider it an element of it's creation.
Significance
It’s distinctive because rather than having the right to exclude users from property, open source property does not really allow exclusion, just distribution. Open source property, as Steven Weber [1] states, “is a governance system that holds together a community of producers around this counterintuitive notion of property rights as distribution [and] is…a political economy that taps into a broad range of human motivations and relies on a creative and evolving set of organizational structures to coordinate behavior.”
Examples
- Mozilla Firefox - web browser
- Linux - operating system
- Android - software platform and operating system developed by Google; currently employed on the new G1 phone
