Open Source Comes to Campus/Curriculum/Saturday/Ethics and history

(General note: At Penn, the way we structured this was as a conversation between two of the teachers, as a full group.)

Structure: All students are in one room. Asheesh lectures initially. Teachers talk for a while and answer the questions that students ask.


 * Free, open source software
 * Users in control


 * Start with two opposing Skype stories


 * Richard M. Stallman at MIT was thinking about these issues in the 1980s. Early history of free software:
 * It starts with a printer
 * This clarifies his understanding of computing freedom
 * He realizes the computing tools he's been using, and that a generation of programmers have been raised on, do not come with essential freedoms.
 * Four freedoms, and GNU.


 * Copyright, and copyleft
 * All rights reserved, by default
 * Copyleft is


 * 1990s
 * 1991: First release of Linux: "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu"
 * 1995: "Apache is a public collaborative effort, where the users determine what happens next."
 * Early on, users of software frequently thought of themselves as system administrators.


 * Lecture:
 * Importance of software transparency (example: Skype)
 * Importance of customizability (example: Dance Dance Immolation)
 * History of "free software" movement...
 * ...simultaneous to Linux pioneering a world of actual collaboration
 * History of the "open source" fracture, and how it dominates
 * Explanation of a few different business models around open source, and how the finances work out (individual consulting; huge support organizations like Red Hat; hosting a service like WordPress.com; Debian, where the "center" has no business model)


 * Teachers re-introduce themselves briefly, and explain in 4 minutes or fewer how they initially got involved in contributing (in any way: documentation, code, design, etc.) to an open source project; what their motivations are; and how they are paid (if at all) for open source work.
 * To avoid a catastrophe of slow talking, we might require slides from teachers for this.


 * Student Q&A.

Assessment: None.