Epistemographer » Open Source http://www.epistemographer.com Mapping knowledge online since 1999 Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:14:32 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 Open Source Ethics… http://www.epistemographer.com/2005/04/01/open-source-ethics/ http://www.epistemographer.com/2005/04/01/open-source-ethics/#comments Fri, 01 Apr 2005 20:08:00 +0000 Josh Greenberg http://www.epistemographer.com/?p=236 Fascinating case that lays bare some of the fundamental assumptions (and internal contradictions) of an open source community:

* “Matt Mullenweg”:http://photomatt.net creates “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org
* WordPress gets “popular”:http://www.daveschalkboard.com/index.php/archives/2005/03/13/how-popular-is-wordpress/ and grows an “open source”:http://wordpress.org/about/ “community”:http://wordpress.org/development/
* Matt makes a decision to spend some of WordPress’ “whuffie”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie, “gets”:http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/03/30/wordpres.shtml “caught”:http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/04/01/wordpres.shtml, “responds”:http://photomatt.net/2005/04/01/a-response/

Takehome questions – how much agency does the founder of an open source project have once the project has grown beyond his/her personal efforts? And what are legitimate revenue streams when people support a project they use not because they have to (buying), but because they want to (tipping/patronage)?

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