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Looking for love in all the wrong places -- why your OSS License won't save you
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In 2009, something quite strange happened in the field of economics. A woman named Elinor Ostrom, who many professional economists had never heard of, won the Nobel Prize in the field. Her seminal work was in the field of "Design principles for Common Pool Resource Utilization". Many of the principles that she outlined are relevant for OSS communities that seek to become highly functioning. We will look at her work, along with the work of David Sloane Wilson, an evolutionary biologist who focused on group selection theory, to shed some light on the conditions necessary for altruistic groups like OSS communities to thrive and prosper.