A number of contemporary authors explore the dynamics of open source today—not as a relic of the early hacker era, but as a living ecosystem shaped by economics, culture, and power.

 A number of contemporary authors explore the dynamics of open source today—not as a relic of the early hacker era, but as a living ecosystem shaped by economics, culture, and power.

Eric S. Raymond remains foundational for understanding the movement’s original ideology, but the modern analytical work is done by others.

The most current and insightful perspective comes from Nadia Eghbal. Her book Working in Public reveals how open source has become global infrastructure and why developers experience burnout. It reads almost like an ethnography of GitHub culture.

Christopher Kelty treats open source as a cultural form rather than just a licensing mechanism. His Two Bits remains one of the deepest examinations of the logic behind collaborative code communities.

Yochai Benkler sees open source as an example of “commons-based production” that operates outside both market logic and state structures—a different model of economic motivation.

Linus Torvalds is not an academic, but his talks, correspondence, and comments amount to a practical philosophy of managing large decentralized projects.

Karl Fogel writes about how open source projects evolve, why communities conflict, and how to build healthy development ecosystems. He is more focused on governance, but that is a crucial part of the field.

Paul Ramsey and Simon Phipps analyze legal and political shifts around open development: licensing, corporate capture, and changes in standards bodies.

Meredith Whittaker and researchers in the FOSS–AI space discuss how major tech companies attempt to “enclose” or privatize open ecosystems in the era of machine learning.

These authors form the core of the current discourse. From there, the field expands into studies of open source as social ecology, political infrastructure, and a tool of digital sovereignty.

Who among contemporary authors examines the issues of open source?

Hashtags:
#OpenSource #FOSS #SoftwareFreedom #DigitalRights #TechPolicy #OpenSourceCommunity #FreeSoftware #CyberSecurity #TechEthics #OpenInnovation

Bibliography:

1. Eric S. Raymond – The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)

2. Chris DiBona, Mark Stone, Danese Cooper – Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution (2005)

3. Josh Lerner, Jean Tirole – The Simple Economics of Open Source (2002)

4. Karl Fogel – Producing Open Source Software (2005)

5. Yochai Benkler – The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (2006)

6. Stefanie Lindstaedt, et al. – various contemporary research on open source governance (2020–2025)

7. Nadia Eghbal – Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (2016)