Josh Lerner, Jean Triole
NBER Working Paper No. 7600
Issued in March 2000
NBER Program(s):Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship
There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open source projects is initially startling. This paper makes a preliminary exploration of the economics of open source software. We highlight the extent to which labor economics, especially the literature on career concerns,' can explain many of these projects' features. Aspects of the future of open source development process, however, remain somewhat difficult to predict with off-the-shelf' economic models.
National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-868-3900; email: info@nber.org
Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming.
Download and start streaming quickly and easily on Windows, Mac or Linux.
Don't blame Microsoft's war on open source all on Steve Ballmer, says former Windows boss Steven Sinofsky.
Degooglize your Internet
find user-friendly tools
Ethical alternatives are possible.
Demonstration with 5 examples
The proprietary filesystem vendor unleashed a '90s-level torrent of FUD yesterday.
Non-judgmental guidance on choosing a license for your open source project
Learn what open source licenses are, which one to choose, and why it matters.
ArchiveBox
The open-source self-hosted web archive.
ArchiveBox takes a list of website URLs you want to archive, and creates a local, static, browsable HTML clone of the content from those websites (it saves HTML, JS, media files, PDFs, images and more).
You can use it to preserve access to websites you care about by storing them locally offline. ArchiveBox imports lists of URLs, renders the pages in a headless, authenticated, user-scriptable browser, and then archives the content in multiple redundant common formats (HTML, PDF, PNG, WARC) that will last long after the originals disappear off the internet. It automatically extracts assets and media from pages and saves them in easily-accessible folders, with out-of-the-box support for extracting git repositories, audio, video, subtitles, images, PDFs, and more.
The git-annex assistant creates a synchronised folder on each of your OSX and Linux computers, Android devices, removable drives, NAS appliances, and cloud services. The contents of the folder are the same everywhere. It's very easy to use, and has all the power of git and git-annex.
installation
The git-annex assistant comes as part of git-annex. See install to get it installed.
See the release notes for an overview of the status, and upgrade instructions.
git-annex allows managing files with git, without checking the file contents into git. While that may seem paradoxical, it is useful when dealing with files larger than git can currently easily handle, whether due to limitations in memory, time, or disk space.
git-annex is designed for git users who love the command line. For everyone else, the git-annex assistant turns git-annex into an easy to use folder synchroniser.
ctmg is an encrypted container manager for Linux using cryptsetup and various standard file system utilities. Containers have the extension .ct and are mounted at a directory of the same name, but without the extension. Very simple to understand, and very simple to implement; ctmg is a simple bash script.
Ledger is a powerful, double-entry accounting system that is accessed from the UNIX command-line. Ledger, begun in 2003, is written by John Wiegley and released under the BSD license. It has also inspired several ports to other languages.
To get started with Ledger, add transactions to a text file in Ledger’s own textual format. Here’s what a single transaction might look like:
2015/10/12 Exxon
Expenses:Auto:Gas $10.00
Liabilities:MasterCard $-10.00
You use the ledger command line program to see the balance of your accounts:
Taskwarrior is Free and Open Source Software that manages your TODO list from the command line. It is flexible, fast, and unobtrusive. It does its job then gets out of your way.
Rclone - rsync for cloud storage
Rclone is a command line program to sync files and directories to and from:
- Amazon S3
- Backblaze B2
- Owncloud
.... - Wasabi
Features
- MD5/SHA1 hashes checked at all times for file integrity
- Timestamps preserved on files
- Partial syncs supported on a whole file basis
- Copy mode to just copy new/changed files
- Sync (one way) mode to make a directory identical
- Check mode to check for file hash equality
- Can sync to and from network, eg two different cloud accounts
- Encryption backend
- Cache backend
- Union backend
- Optional FUSE mount (rclone mount)
- Multi-threaded downloads to local disk
- Can serve local or remote files over HTTP/WebDav/FTP/SFTP/dlna
- Experimental Web based GUI
Tray application and Dolphin/Plasma integration for Syncthing
- Qt 5-based tray application
- Dolphin/Plasma integration
- command-line interface
- Qt-ish C++ interface to control Syncthing
Supported platforms
- Designed to work under any desktop environment supported by Qt 5 with tray icon support
- No desktop environment specific libraries required (only for optional features)
- Tested under * X Window System
Wayland
Windows 10
macOS 10.14 Mojave
Linus Torvalds
"This is just very cool."
Linux apps that run anywhere
"As a user, I want to download an application from the original author, and run it on my Linux desktop system just like I would do with a Windows or Mac application."
"As an application author, I want to provide packages for Linux desktop systems, without the need to get it 'into' a distribution and without having to build for gazillions of different distributions."
Download an application, make it executable, and run! No need to install. No system libraries or system preferences are altered. Can also run in a sandbox like Firejail
Distribute your desktop Linux application in the AppImage format and win users running all common Linux distributions. Package once and run everywhere. Reach users on all major desktop distributions.
“a natural painting toolbox, perfect for everyone from artists to cartoonists, and beyond”
Krita is, and will always be, free software. There is a lot more to learn than this overview page, but you should be getting a good idea of what Krita can do.
Linux Journal Weekend Reading
June 3, 2018
Today Bloomberg reports GitHub was acquired by Microsoft, the announcement being made as early as Monday. "GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information." Bloomberg goes on to say, "Terms of the agreement weren’t known on Sunday. GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015."
Microsoft Acquires GitHub For $7.5 Billion.
Microsoft, who was once generally opposed to open-source development, is now one of the biggest contributors to GitHub.
OpenSource Hosting Alternatives:
- Gitea - https://gitea.io/en-us/
- Apache Allura - https://allura.apache.org/
- GitBucket - https://gitbucket.github.io/
- GitLab: https://about.gitlab.com/
- Kallithea https://kallithea-scm.org/
- GitBlit - http://gitblit.com
- Gitolite - http://gitolite.com
- Fedora Pagure https://pagure.io
- SIT https://sit.fyi
Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.
Available for Mac, Windows, and Linux
Zotero is the only software that automatically senses research on the web. Need an article from JSTOR or a preprint from arXiv.org? A news story from the New York Times or a book from a library? Zotero has you covered, everywhere.
Zotero helps you organize your research any way you want. You can sort items into collections and tag them with keywords. Or create saved searches that automatically fill with relevant materials as you work.
Zotero instantly creates references and bibliographies for any text editor, and directly inside Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs. With support for over 9,000 citation styles, you can format your work to match any style guide or publication.
Zotero can optionally synchronize your data across devices, keeping your notes, files, and bibliographic records seamlessly up to date. If you decide to sync, you can also always access your research from any web browser.
Zotero lets you co-write a paper with a colleague, distribute course materials to students, or build a collaborative bibliography. You can share a Zotero library with as many people you like, at no cost.
Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization that has no financial interest in your private information. With Zotero, you always stay in control of your own data.