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\"We regularly read and hear exhortations for women to take up positions in STEM. The call comes from both government and private corporate circles, and it also emanates from enthusiasts for free and open source software (FOSS), i.e. software that anyone is free to use, copy, study, and change in any way. Ironically, rate of participation in FOSS-related work is far lower than in other areas of computing. A 2002 European Union study showed that fewer than 2 percent of software developers in the FOSS world were women. How is it that an intellectual community of activists so open in principle to one and all -a community that prides itself for its enlightened politics and its commitment to social change - should have such a low rate of participation by women? This book is an ethnographic investigation of efforts to improve the diversity in software and hackerspace communities, with particular attention paid to gender diversity advocacy\"-- Provided by publisher.

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a \"recursive public\"—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

This book contributes new insights into the organization of free/open source (F/OS) software communities by examining the links between learning, division of labour and commercialization, demonstrating the need for a synthesis of work on both community organization and cooperation to understand F/OS community dynamics. These aspects are examined in the light of detailed case studies of the GNOME and KDE projects. This book offers an innovative theoretical framework, a critical assessment of various methodologies for examining the organisation of F/OS communities, and a typology of commercial involvement in F/OS. The analysis reveals the diversity and evolution of F/OS communities and their connections with other socio-economic networks and institutional practices. The insights afforded by the book have implications for future research and the design and implementation of open source efforts. 'This book provides a thorough academic treatise of the open source phenomenon from a multitude of viewpoints, with special emphasis of the under-researched topic of commercialization' Stefan Koch, Vienna University of Economics 'The ‘next steps in the open source revolution’ have been promised by many but few have laid the basic groundwork of connecting real examples from open source practice to actual concepts underpinned by strong theoretical ideas. This book is all the more commendable for succeeding in this far from trivial task' Brian Fitzgerald, University of Limerick Evangelia Berdou is Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. She completed her Ph.D in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2007. Her thesis was awarded LSE's Robert McKenzie prize. Her Ph.D research was sponsored by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) and focused on dynamics of commercialization and peripheral participation (integration of new developers and participation of non-programmers) in mature, community-led Free/Open Source software communities. From 2004-2007 she worked as a research assistant in the DBE (Digital Business Ecosystem) and OPAALS (Open Philosophies for Associative Autopoietic Digital Ecosystems) European funded projects. 1. Introduction 2. Technologies of Communities and Peer Production: Disentagling Power Relations in Fl/Oss Development 3. Fl/Oss as an Object of Research: Methodological and Disciplinary Issues 4. Commercial Involvement and Fl/Oss 5. The Community, the Firm and the Two Economies 6. Learning and the Division of Labour in Fl/Oss 7. The Story So Far: Technologies of Communities and Peer Production 8. Conclusions

Introduction -- Technologies of communities and peer production: disentagling power relations in FL/OSS development -- FL/OSS as an object of research : methodological and disciplinary issues -- Commercial involvement and FL/OSS -- The community, the firm and the two economies -- Learning and the division of labour in FL/OSS -- The story so far : technologies of communities and peer production -- Conclusions.

This book contributes new insights into the organization of free/open source (F/OS) software communities by examining the links between learning, division of labor and commercialization, demonstrating the need for a synthesis of work on both community organization and cooperation to understand F/OS community dynamics. These aspects are examined in the light of detailed case studies of the GNOME and KDE projects. This book offers an innovative theoretical framework, a critical assessment of various methodologies for examining the organization of F/OS communities, and a typology of commercial in

From downloading music and movies to accessing free software, digital media is forcing us to rethink the very idea of intellectual property. While big companies complain about lost profits, the individual has never enjoyed such freedom and autonomy. Berry explores this debate in a concise way, offering an ideal introduction for anyone not versed in the legalistic terminology that - up until now - has dominated coverage of this issue. Looking at the historical development of the free software and the open source movement he examines its growth, politics and potential impact, showing how the ideas that inspired the movement have now begun to influence the wider cultural landscape. He explores whether free software offers us the potential to re-think our relationship with technology in the information society. This book will appeal to students of media and journalism, and anyone interested in new opportunities for creating a truly independent and democratic media.

Open source software is considered by many to be a novelty and the open source movement a revolution. Yet the collaborative creation of knowledge has gone on for as long as humans have been able to communicate. CODE looks at the collaborative model of creativity -- with examples ranging from collective ownership in indigenous societies to free software, academic science, and the human genome project -- and finds it an alternative to proprietary frameworks for creativity based on strong intellectual property rights.Intellectual property rights, argues Rishab Ghosh in his introduction, were ostensibly developed to increase creativity; but today, policy decisions that treat knowledge and art as if they were physical forms of property actually threaten to decrease creativity, limit public access to creativity, and discourage collaborative creativity. \"Newton should have had to pay a license fee before being allowed even to see how tall the 'shoulders of giants' were, let alone to stand upon them,\" he writes.The contributors to CODE, from such diverse fields as economics, anthropology, law, and software development, examine collaborative creativity from a variety of perspectives, looking at new and old forms of creative collaboration and the mechanisms emerging to study them. Discussing the philosophically resonant issues of ownership, property, and the commons, they ask if the increasing application of the language of property rights to knowledge and creativity constitutes a second enclosure movement -- or if the worldwide acclaim for free software signifies a renaissance of the commons. Two concluding chapters offer concrete possibilities for both alternatives, with one proposing the establishment of \"positive intellectual rights\" to information and another issuing a warning against the threats to networked knowledge posed by globalization.

The growing interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from both the scientific and industrial sectors has attracted a wave of new researchers and substantial investments in this expansive field. However, due to the wide range of topics and subdomains within UAV research, newcomers may find themselves overwhelmed by the numerous options available. It is therefore crucial for those involved in UAV research to recognize its interdisciplinary nature and its connections with other disciplines. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the UAV field, highlighting recent trends and advancements. Drawing on recent literature reviews and surveys, the review begins by classifying UAVs based on their flight characteristics. It then provides an overview of current research trends in UAVs, utilizing data from the Scopus database to quantify the number of scientific documents associated with each research direction and their interconnections. This paper also explores potential areas for further development in UAVs, including communication, artificial intelligence, remote sensing, miniaturization, swarming and cooperative control, and transformability. Additionally, it discusses the development of aircraft control, commonly used control techniques, and appropriate control algorithms in UAV research. Furthermore, this paper addresses the general hardware and software architecture of UAVs, their applications, and the key issues associated with them. It also provides an overview of current open source software and hardware projects in the UAV field. By presenting a comprehensive view of the UAV field, this paper aims to enhance our understanding of this rapidly evolving and highly interdisciplinary area of research.