ABSTRACT

Free software, in its modern incarnation, was founded largely on an ideology of “freedom, community, and principle,” with little regard for the profit motive (Stallman 1999, 70). Yet today FOSS makes headlines daily1 as corporations relying on “open source development” demonstrate remarkable financial success (Vaughan-Nichols 2005; Brown 2006); those that before hewed to closed-source development and distribution now open significant parts of their code repositories (Farrell 2006) and develop partnerships with open source firms (Haskins 2006; Krill 2006); and free and open source software-licensing schemes become challenges to be tackled by legal departments of software firms keen to draw on FOSS’s unique resources (Lindquist 2006).