on Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 04:24:57PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull (stephen@xemacs.org) wrote:
> >>>>> "kms" == Karsten M Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> writes:
> 
>     kms> Here in the Bay Area we've got Hal Varian, dean of the School
>     kms> of Information Management Science, at Berkeley.
> 
> Hal is a smart guy, and a good one, but he's not done research on
>  open source  last I talked to him (part of that is due to being dean,
> of course), and he's never done empirical work to speak of.  This last
> is quite important to this discussion.

    http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/papers.html

     Linux Adoption in the Public Sector [PDF]
         (Co-authored with Carl Shapiro.) White paper describing some of
         the economic issues surrounding open source and open standards
         software and its adoption by the public sector.

         http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/2004/linux-adoption-in-the-public-sector.pdf

It's non-technical and more a "here's what GNU/Linux is" rather than
"economics of free software development", but you might want to work
through the footnotes.  So he's sort of a border case:  works with it,
knows it a lot, not much research to date.


Siobhan O'Mahony, Harvard Business School, did her PhD dissertation on
organizational structure of free software projects:

    The Emergence of a New Commercial Actor: Community Managed Software
    Projects
    http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/omahony.pdf

...and continues to do research in the area:

    http://dor.hbs.edu/fi redirect.jhtml?facInfo=pub&facEmId=somahony&loc=extn


 
> He's a user of open source though, one of the earliest converts to TeX
> in the economics profession, and production his recent books are all
> managed with various open source TeX tools, *nix, emacs, and rcs.

Right.  Also the person respnsible for nixing the advertising clause
from the BSD license, for which he deserves many thanks.


Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    The question is not whether I'm paranoid, it's whether I'm paranoid enough.