On Thursday, in a joint session with Harvard Law School, we'll look at some of the implications of proprietary software, including the power of Microsoft and the Microsoft anti-trust case, and the alternative of Open Code.
For twenty years Open Code has been building momentum in the technical cultures that built the Internet and the World Wide Web. Now it is breaking out into the commercial world, and that is changing all the rules. The basic idea behind open source is very simple. When programmers on the Internet can read, redistribute, and modify the source for a piece of software, it evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, and people fix the bugs. This can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slower pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing. Those in the open-source community have found that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.
Issues we will address: Should universities and other public-minded institutions care about the software that underlies their activities, particularly software that supports teaching? Along what dimensions other than efficiency might we judge code? In what principled way should a university farm out some software tasks, do others in-house, and in either case hope to draw code from, and share its own results with, other institutions? What about the government? Corporations?
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Last modified: October 3 1999, 8:46 PM