Re: free software - disitation

[Alessandro Rubini]

Hi.

> I am about to write my BA examination paper and 
> would like to write about the filosophy behind free software.

It will be free documentation, won't it?

> I have found a 
> lot of articles on the web but wonder if there are any deeper-going

www.gnu.org/philosophy is the best place where to find that stuff, but
I think you already know that. Obviously, this is the FSF view of the
issue, but I don't know of other collections of articles (for example,
I'm not aware of open-source philosophy repositories besides the
set of essays by Eric Raymond).

> and possible more academic texts and books on the subject

There have been a lot of work on this kind of stuff, but I don't have
a collection of pointers. I hope you will share your findings, though,
as such a gallery is a very important resource for us.

A few pointers I've come across:

  Eric von Hippel (http://www.mit.edu/people/evhippel/) has very interesting
     stuff about user-driven innovation (as opposed to producer-driven) and
     other economic studies. He has more interesting papers than those on
     the web, I suppose you can try to bug him.

  Lerner and Triole: "The simple economics of Open Source"
     (http://papers.nber.org/papers/w7600) -- just got the pointer, didn't
     yet read it.

And then there's "the Mythical Man-Month" (dind't read it, but looks worth
checking out) and all the material by Lawrence Lessig. (this may not be
completely on-topic, though)

/alessandro