Coraline Ada Ehmke

The Broken Promise of Open Source

Coraline Ada Ehmke

The open source movement has fallen far short of the idealism of its earliest proponents. What began as a utopian vision of programmers creating free software for free distribution in practice reflects the same significant cultural issues prevalent throughout the software industry: problems of unequal access and oppressive power structures enabling a privileged few to act as gatekeepers of access and arbiters of value. This talk explores the fundamental principles upon which open source was based and how each in turn has been subverted by the reality of human nature.

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