Open Source Intellectual Property Rights

Abstract

The open source software movement exists as a loose collection of individuals, organizations, and philosophies roughly grouped under the intent of making software source code as widely available as possible (Raymond, 1998). While the movement as such can trace its roots back more than 30 years to the development of academic software, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and so forth, the popularization of the movement grew significantly from the mid-80s (Naughton, 2000).