Open Source Software and Corporate Influence — Andrew Lilley Brinker

Open source software projects are frequently enmeshed with the interests of corporations. We should update mental models of who works on open source accordingly, and build or modify power structures to be more resilient to corporate capture.

A Call to Build Models Like We Build Open-Source Software

1  Introduction 2  A brief explanation of open-source software development 3  Community-developed and continually-improved models   3.1  Incremental and cheaply-communicable updates   3.2  Merging models   3.3  Vetting community contributions   3.4  Versioning and backward compatibility   3.5  Modularity and distribution 4  An example future 5  Conclusion

Software Stewardship Lab

A non-profit research lab dedicated to ensuring the stability of the Open Source ecosystem we all rely on.

progression.fyi

A collection of open source frameworks for helping designers and engineers to grow at work

Open source is a restaurant

[[Chad Whitacre]] makes a great analogy around when/how software gets paid for, vs food. Open Source is a restaurant. At a restaurant, you eat your meal fir...

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open S…

An inside look at modern open source software developer…

Open Source Endowment — World's First Endowment Fund for OSS

The Open Source Endowment provides truly sustainable funding for critical open source software through a community-driven endowment model.

Home - Open Source Collective

Open Source Collective is a non-profit fiscal host for open source projects. Get Transparent fundraising, money management, and legal representation

A Research Lab for Open Source ✸ Software Stewardship Lab

Today, we're launching a world-class research lab dedicated to Open Source sustainability with a team of some of the most experienced people in the world.

From OSS to Open Source AI: an Exploratory Study of Collaborative...

AI development is embracing open-source paradigm, but the fundamental distinction between AI models and traditional software artifacts may lead to a divergent open-source development paradigm with...

Taxonomy for ATmospheric Lexicon and App Directories

I kept going to pull quotes but just like, all of this. lol Something really basic like a taxonomy of concepts has the potential to skew heavily social, because at a technical level there’s almost nothing to it: you have an identity with some labels (synonyms, language-tagged strings—not sure how those’ll be implemented), you might have a definition, and then you have a handful of semantic relations, and the concept scheme class to yoke them together. (Again, I’m using SKOS as a template for th...

Some startups are going ‘fair source’ to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing | TechCrunch

New alternative category to 'closed source' could help companies monetize software in the open -- without going all-in on open source.

AFFiNE — Open-Source Knowledge Base Software

AFFiNE is the open-source Notion & Miro alternative — combining docs, whiteboards, databases, and AI in one local-first workspace. Free for teams.

Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities

Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.

Block - Open Source

By collaborating in the open, we create higher quality software, hardware, and protocols through relentless collective examination, and also ensure our systems, hardware, and protocols evolve to meet real-world needs.

Designing and Programming Malleable Software

User needs for software features and interfaces are diverse and changing, motivating the goal of making it as easy as possible for users themselves to change software, or to have it changed on their behalf in response to their developing needs. However, in my opinion, current approaches do not address this issue adequately: software engineering promotes flexible code, but in practice this does not help end-users effect change in their software. End-user and live programming systems help users customize their interfaces by accessing and modifying the underlying source code. I take a different approach, seeking to maximize the kinds of modifications that can take place through regular interactions, e.g. direct manipulation of interface elements. I call this approach malleable software. To understand contemporary needs for and barriers to modifying software, I study how it is produced, maintained, adopted, and appropriated in a network of communities working with biodiversity data. I find that the mode of software production, i.e. the technologies and economic relations that produce software, is biased towards centralized, one-size-fits-all systems. This leads me to propose a long-term, interdisciplinary research program in reforming the tools of software development to create infrastructures for plurality. These tools should help multiple communities collaborate without forcing them to consolidate around identical interfaces or data representations. Malleable software is one such infrastructure, in which interactive systems are dynamic constellations of interfaces, devices, and programs assembled at the site of use. My technological contribution is a reconstruction of the programming mechanisms used to create interactive behavior. I generalize existing control structures for interaction as entanglements, and develop a higher-order control structure, entanglers, which produces entanglements when particular pre-conditions, called co-occurrences, are met. Entanglers cause interactions to be assembled dynamically as system components come and go. I develop these mechanisms in Tangler, a prototype environment for building malleable interactive software. I demonstrate how Tangler supports malleability through a set of benchmark cases illustrating how users can modify systems by themselves or with programmer assistance. This thesis is an early step towards a paradigm for programming and designing malleable software that can keep up with human diversity.