This ambitious look at the open source phenomenon does so not from a technological view but a sociopolitical one. The author, a political scientist, explores why open source works and what those lessons mean on a broader scale. Can the open source model, which relies on non-paid labor, be used to accomplish great works of public good? What are its implications for economic growth and development? After all, Weber says, open source is not software—it's a way of organizing production to make things jointly.
Weber sets out to answer three fundamental questions at the heart of the success of open source: Why do software developers devote time and effort to open source projects without compensation? How and why are open source projects coordinated? And finally, how does the open source community get around "Brooks's Law," which says that adding programmers to a job increases the time to complete it?
He also ponders how the notion of property is radically transformed in an open source universe. "Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude," he says. Can a working economic system be built around a core notion of property rights as distribution?
With answers in hand, Weber ponders the future. Because the software is available for free to anyone who wants it, open source has the power to, if not eliminate, at least shrink the digital divide among nations, he says, by providing poor countries with the computing resources needed to participate on the world economic stage. Weber also foresees that open source's reliance on reusable code means that innovation can happen more swiftly and cheaply, perhaps even bringing the power of supercomputing to the individual. On an organizational level, companies will become more creative about attacking problems by "open sourcing" a solution to scattered teams or individuals.