Governance | Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Below is the text of an article I wrote for a LYRASIS member newsletter in which I talk about the nature of governance in open source software projects. I’m reposting it here for the DLTJ readership.

One of the more fascinating aspects of open source software is the role that its creators and users play in its evolution. (For more on the community nature of open source software, see a previous article, The Challenges and Rewards of Open Source) With proprietary systems, the creators and users are separate groups, and the control over the relationship is bound up in proprietary rights and contracts. (This doesn’t diminish the role of robust user groups for proprietary software; rather it is a reflection of where the ultimate control lies – with the creators of the software.) With open source software, the creators and users are commonly the same or closely overlapping. How do creators and users work with each other? This is a question of governance.

This is a preview of Governance in Open Source Software Projects. Read the full post (884 words, 1 image, 3:32 minutes estimated reading time)

ICANN Logo Just as it turns 40, the internet comes of age. One day before of the anniversary of the first two computers connected together by a prototype network in 1969¹ — a move that foreshadowed the worldwide network of computers we know today — the U.S. Government announced that it was forever releasing direct control over a key governance organization that makes the internet run. Called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), that governance organization is what runs the top level domain name servers (DNS). And that is important because it is the DNS that translates human-friendly names such as “www.google.com” and “dltj.org” into network-friendly addresses.