[Reader-list] Bibliography on the Ethics of Free Software

[Jamie Dow]

Dear listmembers,
This post is partly for information, partly to see if this information can be improved upon. It's a bibliography of serious academic work on the ethics of Free (Libre) and Open-Source Software - but mainly Free Software.

The bibliography is pasted below - I know that this is an issue on which many on this list take a keen interest. I hope this is a useful source to you.

I'd be interested to hear of any important or good pieces that you know of that are not listed here.

In that connection, I'm interested specifically on the *ethics* of free and non-free software (so history of the movement, technical evaluations, and sociological analysis are not relevant here. Legal stuff on licensing can go either way - I'm only interested in jurisprudential stuff that deals with the ethical issues.).

Best wishes, Jamie Dow


*Free Software Bibliography*



_2 Classics:_

Raymond, Eric (2001) /The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 2/^/nd/ / Edition, /O’Reilly.

Stallman, Richard M (2002) /Free Software, Free Society/, (Intro by Lawrence Lessig, edited by Joshua Gay) Cambridge, MA: Free Software Foundation.



_General (lightly vetted, and simply in the order they came to me):_

Falquet, G and Grin, F (2008) “Free Software, Proprietary Software and Linguistic Justice” in eds. Gosseries, A, Marciano, A and Strowel, A (2008) /Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice/, London: Macmillan.

Nissenbaum*,* Helen (1995) “Should I copy my Neighbour’s Software?” in eds. Nissenbaum, H & Johnson, D (1995) /Computers, Ethics and Social Values/, Prentice Hall, pp.201-213.

Lerner, Joshua and Tirole, Jean (2000) /The Simple Economics of Open Source (NBER working paper series), /NBER.

Kimppa, Kai K. (2005) “Intellectual Property Rights in Software—Justifiable from a Liberalist Position? The Free Software Foundations Position in Comparison to John Locke's Concept of Property”, in Richard A. Spinello and Herman T. Tavani (eds.), /Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice/, Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing.

Kimppa, Kai K. (2004) “Intellectual Property Rights – or Rights to the Immaterial – in Digitally Distributable Media Gone All Wrong?”, in Lee Freeman and Graham Peace (eds.), /Information Ethics: Privacy and Intellectual Property/, Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing.

Kimppa Kai K. (2007) /Problems with the Justification of Intellectual Property Rights in Relation to Software and Other Digitally Distributable Media: PhD thesis/, May 2007. Available (in part) at: _http://www.tucs.fi/publications/attachment.php?fname=DISS83.pdf_

Tavani, Herman T. (2004) “Balancing intellectual property rights and the intellectual commons: a Lockean analysis”, /Information, Communication and Ethics in Society,/ 2: S5–S14

Tavani, Herman T. (2005) “Locke, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Information Commons”, /Ethics and Information Technology,/ 7:87–97

DiBona,Chris; Ockman, Sam and Stone, Mark (1999) /Open Sources : Voices from the Open Source Revolution/, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media Inc..

DiBona, Chris; Stone, Mark and Cooper, Danese (2005) /Open Sources 2.0 The Continuing Evolution, /Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media Inc..

Sunstein, Cass R. (2006) /Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge/, New York: Oxford University Press. Esp. ch 5.

Moglen, Eben (2003) /Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture, /http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.html.

Moglen, Eben (2003) /The dotCommunist Manifesto, /http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/dcm.html

Berry, David M. (2004) “The Contestation of Code: A Preliminary Investigation into the Discourse of the Free/Libre and Open Source Movements”, /Critical Discourse Studies/ 1 (1): 65–89.

Berry, David M., and Moss, Giles (2006) “Free and Open Source Software: Opening and Democratising E-Government’s Black Box”, /Information Polity/ 11:21–34.

Cusumano, Michael; Shirky, Clay; Feller, Joseph; Fitzgerald, Brian; Hissam, Scott A. and Lakhani, Karim R. (eds.) (2005) /Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software,/ Cambridge: MIT Press.

Weber, Steven (2004) /The Success of Open Source,/ Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

M. Wolf (moderator), D. Gotterbarn, K. Bowyer, and K. Miller. (2002) “Open Source Software: Intellectual Challenges to the Status Quo”/,/ /ACM, SIGCSE 2002/, Cincinnati, OH (March 2, 2002).

F. Grodzinsky, K. Miller and M. Wolf. (2004) “Ethical Issues in Open Source Software”, /Readings in Cyberethics 2/^/nd/ /edition,/ R. Spinello and H. Tavani, eds. Jones and Bartlett, 2004. 351-366. (reprinted conference paper)

Miller, Keith (2007) “Open source software and consequential responsibility: GPU, GPL, and the no military use clause”, /APA Newsletter of Philosophy and Computers/, Vol. 6, No. 2 (ed. Boltuc, P), 17-22.



_More towards Legal-Theory:_

Rosen, Lawrence (2004) /Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law,/ Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall PTR.

St Laurent, Andrew (2004) /Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing/, O’Reilly.

(The Eben Moglen writings may belong in this “legal” category.)

Zittrain, Jonathan (2004) “Normative Principles for Evaluating Free and Proprietary Software”, /Harvard Law School Public Law Research Papers,/ No. 98, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=529862 .