After examining a wide range of topics, I believe I've managed to narrow down my choice to one involving open source software. Here's the current abstract I have going. As I do more research I'll post any information I find relevant to this topic.
The Effect of Open Source Development on the Computing Industry
"Richard Stallman has described GNU and the GPL as tools to liberate developers and development of software. He described the troubles he faced, before the creation of GNU and GPL when he worked at the MIT AI lab. His description tells of the emergence of a new licensing agreement, and how it restricted him from sharing his code with fellow developers and reading the code that made the tools he used, run. Seeing this as fundamentally wrong he began development on GNU, along with other developers, to ensure such a thing would not happen again.However, criticism emerged that by making the software free, as in speech, he was hurting the industry's ability to grow, due to decreased pay for developers and the concept of software released under the GPL as being unable to be used in a real world business environment. In addition to this criticism, open source software has also been said to lack innovation, in that it simply copies existing commercial software, instead of breaking new ground.
The aim of my research and paper is to discover whether or not these criticisms stand upon solid ground, and to determine how open source development has impacted the software industry, in either a more negative or positive way, and how the GPL has either freed software developers or further restricted them."
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This information is in a beta form and will be updated and edited. If you have any suggestions of ways to expand/improve, feel free to notify me.
