Sen No Sen

Daily Kos

On 12/03/04, Internet Explorer had 67 percent of browsers. Earlier in 2004, IE enjoyed over 85 percent of the market.

As of this post’s writing, IE is down to 55 percent of Daily Kos readers. That number can fluctuate quite a bit over a typical day, so at times IE will drop below 50 percent.

When I’m asked about blogging’s legacy, I talk about open source. Open source politics, open source activism, open source journalism — the aggregation of thousands on behalf of a common cause. Bloggers and their opinions might be mildly interesting, but the ability to pool our efforts on issues that capture the collective imagination is what really gets me excited

The Slashdot exchange.

It’s exactly the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but taken from the arena of computers and moved into politics.

It seems like the phrase “open source” is being confused with the similar, but different, “free to use”, “free speech” or “freedom of expression.” We hear about open source journalism, open source biology, open source research and even open source beer. [voresoel.dk]

I’m not saying that this is a bad thing… I’m just making an observation. It makes me wonder if in twenty years from now, when new countries are writing their constitutions, will they guarantee their citizens “open source rights?”

Then there’s Bruce Perens’ piece: The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source

Open Source developers have, perhaps without conscious intent, created a new and surprisingly successful economic paradigm for the production of software. Examining that paradigm can answer a number of important questions.

It’s not immediately obvious how Open Source[1] works economically. Probably the worst consequence of this lack of understanding is that many people don’t understand how Open Source could be economically sustainable, and some may even feel that its potential negative effect upon the proprietary software industry is an overall 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.