Weber, who specializes in international relations, says the book "delves into the phenomenon of how large groups manage to sustain long-term cooperative relationships outside of authority structures." He is interested in how OS projects, like Linux and Apache, succeed outside of a monetary economy and hierarchical, corporate governance structure.

Weber started out asking why a large number of programmers would be motivated to volunteer their time to a goal that does not have a direct individual financial benefit, but found that more pertinent questions should be asked.

Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley

Steven Weber, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and author of The Success of Open Source (published by Harvard University Press).

"When I began my research I thought the interesting problem was explaining why people would contribute to this joint common good," says Weber. "That was one of those cases where your discipline leads you in the wrong direction at first and you need to rethink your hypotheses from the ground up. Once I spent some time with the people involved in open source development, it was pretty obvious to me that their individual motivations, while interesting in themselves, wasn't the really hard puzzle to solve. The hard question was why it all worked together. Another way to say this is, the fact that people contribute code to Linux is not a surprise. The fact that it has evolved over time to become a complex piece of software that works is the surprise."

Weber argues that to understand the open source community and how it produces successful products, it should be viewed in the context of a political economy, not a monetary one. Open source is not a free-for-all, as some may believe, but rather has its own set of unique rules and decisionmaking procedures.

"If you are going to try to scale production systems to non-friend, non-kinship groups, you have to have some sort of governance," explains Weber. "For example, I would not put my lecture notes on the web because I feel strangely about people I don't know benefiting from my work without them giving anything in return. The trick for the open source projects is to find a way to create that reverse flow such that if I donate a piece of intellectual product to something that other people are going to use and modify, I want to somehow benefit from what they're learning -- that's the key exchange. The trick, and what people are experimenting with, are different ways to structure that exchange so it works."

At the heart of open source is the belief that if code is opened up, as opposed to being hidden away in proprietary software, it will produce a better product. Weber points to statistics that lend support to this theory: 65% of all web sites use Apache web server software, and almost 40% of large American companies use the Linux operating system.

Clearly OS has caught on and has implications for how intellectual content is produced and disseminated in the future.

In the political economy of open source, says Weber, intellectual property is viewed as "the right to distribute, not to exclude others from it." Weber says this philosophy may have hit a nerve with the general public in part as a reaction to restrictive intellectual property regimes that have become unbalanced in the way that they favor the owner to the detriment of the greater good.

Says Weber: "I think it taps into a sense a lot of people have that the commercialization and privatization of something that we like to think of as joint community assets have gone too far."