This is "the" seminal article which helped articulate free and open source software development. It is a very interesting read. Not every one in the hacker community would agree with what he says but it provides a grounded practitioner view with regards to how software gets developed and supported within the hacker community. Academic research on free/open source software is picking up steam. I, along with Eric von Hippel, run the Free/Open Source Software Research Community website at MIT http://opensource.mit.edu or if you prefer http://freesoftware.mit.edu. We have over 30 working papers (and growing) from many different perspectives (economic, sociological, management, policy etc.) from scholars from around the world -- available for download. You can find the papers here http://opensource.mit.edu/online_papers.php There is also a research directory and a discussion list for those interested in the research side of things. Finally, I, along with colleagues from BCG, presented a survey of motivations and effort in the open source community two weeks ago. The presentation can be found here http://osdn.com/bcg/ It provides a snapshot of the individuals writing all this great software. This phenomenon is very interesting, my dissertation is in this area and should be of general interest to folks on AIR. ciao, K -- =================================== Karim R. Lakhani MIT Sloan School of Management MIT Open Source Research Project e-mail: lakhani@mit.edu voice: 617-851-1224 fax: 617-344-0403 http://opensource.mit.edu http://mit.edu/lakhani/www ===================================