Tracing the trajectory of a techno-legal ecology: stories from the open source development…
Tracing the trajectory of a techno-legal ecology: stories from the open source development of the Gnutella protocol. Prodromos Tsiavos
Department of Information Systems
London School of Economics and Political Science
I will study the workings of an open source license that is the General Public License in the Gnutella case in order to assess its nature and the level of openness it allows.
In order to achieve this objective the paper suggest a methodological shift from studying regulation as an end product to the study of regulation as a self-producing process. This is achieved by using Actor Network Theory (as described by Bruno Latour): 20,000 postings exchanged by the various developers of the Gnutella protocol are qualitatively analysed through the employment of the AtlasTi software in order to assess the frequencies of participation and the transformation of arguments over a period of four years. The instance of the emergence of a protocol alternative to the original Gnutella protocol, called Gnutella2 is the particular focus of the paper that aims at assessing the nature of openness that the GPL license provides.
