Wednesday, February 13, 2001
Hewlett Packard Auditorium, 306 Soda Hall
4:00-5:00 p.m.

Dr. Steven Weber

UC Berkeley

What the Success of Open Source Means...

Abstract:

I will present the key arguments from my forthcoming book, The Success of Open Source. From a political economy perspective, the open source software 'process' is a remarkable example of large-scale, decentralized and ansynchronous cooperation among geographically dispersed developers operating outside of a traditional authority structure. What is the analytic problem here that social scientists should care about? What is the 'solution' to that problem that the open source process has arrived at? I will concentrate on several key implications ­ what we learn from that set of solutions that is of general interest to understanding the political economy of the Internet, network economies, and cooperation in general.

Steven Weber is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley; and an associate with the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE). His areas of special interest include international political economy, political and social change in the Œnew¹ economy, and the political economy of globalization and European integration. His publications include Cooperation and Discord in U.S.-Soviet Arms Control, the edited book Globalization and The European Political Economy, and numerous articles and chapters in the areas of U.S. foreign policy, political economy of the post-Cold War world, and European integration. His current research focuses on the political economy of knowledge-based industries and open-source software models (The Success of Open Source will be published in 2002). He is a consultant with Global Business Network in Emeryville, California where he works with global firms and governments on the political-economy consequences of information and communications technologies. He is also a Senior Advisor at the Markle Foundation in New York.