Research Paper

The paper will investigate the relationship between open-source software and globalization.

What follows is a first pass at generating a topic for the research paper component of my senior project. Expect changes in the future.

Although globalization has been trend since the the late 18th century, in the past 20 years the Internet has accelerated the pace of globalization in industries across every sector. With cheap or free access to world-wide communication and finance tools, entrepreneurs, employees, and consumers can do business with each other from across the globe. However, not everyone believes this to be a good thing. Many people in first-world countries believe that globalization will lead to them losing their jobs to workers in third-world countries willing to work for lower wages. In many cases, they are correct.

However, open-source software showcases the other side of the coin. In the open-source community, projects started in Europe have contributors from the South America, leaders in Africa, and users in the US. Rather than forcing people out of their jobs, the Internet and globalization has allowed increased specialization - if you can get hired from anywhere in the world, you can afford to get very, very good at one particular technology, and be sure that you can find projects that require that skillset.

There are other arguments to be made about the positive effects of globalization in the open-source world. I will expand on the idea in the paper.

All this leads to the question that my paper will seek to answer - can we apply the lessons of open source to other tech businesses, and even non-tech ones? What would that look like, and what would it mean for businesses to think this way? I will investigate remote work, the "digital nomad", and other pertinent topics as they relate to this question.