Abstract
Presentation Title:
Social Movements in Technology Development:
Explaining the Success of The Free/Open Source Software Movement

This presentation examines the sociological factors behind the apparent success of the Free/Open Source Software Movement. The movement has a whole can be considered successful by most measures of success: 1) Significant market share for key strategic products; 2) Large number of participants (active developers are in the hundred thousands); 3) Creation of alternative 'free' products (over 30,000 listed projects); 4) Commercial acceptance ( in many large companies running core infrastructure) and 5) Changes in behavior of software companies towards more openness.

I will posit five factors as being significant to movement success and will support my claims with a recently completed survey of F/OSS developers.

Biographical Sketch
Karim R. Lakhani is a doctoral student at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group.  He is a co-founder of the MIT Open Source Research Project and runs the MIT based Open Source Research Community website. His research at MIT is focused on the management of technological innovation with a specific focus on coordination and innovation in open source communities. His work at BCG is focused on the intersection of emerging technologies, intellectual property and new organization forms. He has a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and Management from McMaster University, Canada, and a Masters in Technology and Policy from MIT. Previously he worked at GE Medical Systems.