Monthly Archive for April, 2007

Economic motivation of open source software

Have you ever wondered why companies like IBM tend to use open source in their solutions and even pay developers to write software that’s given away for free? An article by Dirk Riehle entitled The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives may answer some of your questions.

The article will be most interesting to those with a basic understanding of microeconomics (like the knowledge gained from Waterloo’s ECON 101). However, I’m sure you’ll still find it valuable if you’ve never seen a demand curve before. If you’re interested, you can read up on demand curves at Wikipedia’s page on supply and demand.

Complete video of Richard Stallman talk available

I’ve updated the page containing pictures and videos from the Richard Stallman talk at UCSD, which was mentioned in a previous post, with a complete video of his talk, provided to me by UCSD. I would suggest skimming the index of interesting points in the video that I’ve added to the page to see if there is anything in the video that you’d like to watch.

Immigration, global warming, and capitalism

I recently rented the Children of Men DVD, which contains a 27-minute extra called The Possibility of Hope. I highly recommend watching this extra. It brings to the surface many problems with the way industries and governments are moving forward, which we tend to ignore or never discuss.

The Possibility of Hope is available in 5 parts on YouTube (1 2 3 4 5) or in 1 part on Yahoo! Video. I’m not sure if the publisher of The Possibility of Hope approves of these distribution methods so if you’re concerned about that, definitely rent the Children of Men DVD.