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| Overview: | | Overview: |
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| * Very briefly introduce my own qualifications and biases;
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| * ''Overview and background on FLOSS'' with an emphasis on: | | * ''Overview and background on FLOSS'' with an emphasis on: |
| ** The key people; | | ** The key people |
| ** Key moments, principles, and documents; | | ** Key moments, principles, and documents |
| ** The famous debate of free versus open. | | ** The famous debate of free versus open. |
| * ''Social science research on FLOSS'' with an emphasis on how this debate has research and my own take: | | * ''Social science research on FLOSS'' with an emphasis on how this debate has research and my own take: |
| ** I'll show some examples from my own work on FLOSS; | | ** I'll show some examples from my own work on FLOSS |
| ** ...and talk about how I'm integrating design with social science. | | ** ...and talk about how I'm integrating design with social science |
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| == My Background ==
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| My background is in work on free software projects over 16 years(!) in a variety of projects:
| | FLOSS philosophy |
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| * [http://www.debian.org Debian]
| | - play up the argument between free versus open |
| * [http://www.spi-inc.org Software in the Public Interest]
| | - so here's my observation |
| * [http://www.ubuntu.com Ubuntu]
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| * [http://www.fsf.org FSF]
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| I've made a transition into academic research on the same subjects:
| | free verus proprietary is largely a legal distinction |
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| * Anthropological work on the cultivation of ethic in FLOSS communities
| | the argument at the heart of open source is that legal distinction leads |
| * More recently sociological work on community dynamics in FLOSS
| | to stuff that is inherently better. |
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| == My Biased History of FLOSS ==
| | i believe it's ok to religious position on religious things. |
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| === Early History ===
| | so if i want to say that using software that is free is ethically |
| | important, i can say that, and i'm not wrong necessary as long as i've |
| | followed some sort of coherent ethical philosophy based on a set of |
| | assumptions i actually hold |
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| * RMS Printer story / MIT AI Lab (familiar to many people)
| | but whether something is better or not is an empirical point |
| * [http://www.novalis.org/history-of-fsm/slide-24.html Emacs Software Sharing Commune]
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| * Free software was a ''reclaimist'' movement for freedom
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| * Strong orientation as a social movement calling for control and autonomy
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| As so there is no ambiguity. I'm in this camp and this is why I do what I do.
| | in fact, i think there's a huge amount of variation in how successful |
| | these projects are. |
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| === Early Structure ===
| | social science, and engineering, and a lot of other areas, have |
| | for the most part listened to the raymond story and taken it seriously. |
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| * [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Free Software Definition]
| | but by considering apache, and linux, etc., we are selecting on the |
| * [http://www.fsf.org Free Software Foundation]
| | dependent variable and it's not clear what we're learning. |
| * [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ Copyleft]
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| * [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html GPL]
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| * [http://www.gnu.org GNU Project] and the creation of a replacement for UNIX
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| === Open Source ===
| | more problematically, we can't look at all the way that free software is |
| | failing completely. |
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| * Open Source is born of frustration with free software personality and its posture with business interests and the late 90s tech bubble and the DotCom boom
| | there is huge bias in the types of people who are being "empowered" in |
| * [http://opensource.org/ Open Source Initiative] started by [http://catb.org/esr/ Eric Raymond] (author of [http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ Cathedral and the Bazaar]), [http://perens.com/ Bruce Perens] and others
| | the sense that they are taking advantage. and those biases tend to fall |
| * [http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php Open Source Definition]
| | along the types of existing gender, class, and national lines. the fsf |
| * Motivations emphasizing the pragmatic benefits of fee software
| | board is a bunch of people who look a whole lot like me. |
| ** OS can be seen as a development methodology
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| ** "A inherently better way to produce better software"
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| * "Opposite of a schism"
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| === Going Mainstream (ups and downs) ===
| | so i'm a partison here. i take an strong ethical position in favor of |
| | software freedom.. |
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| * Perhaps the major breakthrough was with Netscape releasing code to their browser in 1998
| | so the open source position might be: |
| * Many other companies ended up getting carried away in the boom (VA Linux (LNUX has single biggest IPO) (Krantz and Henry, 1999)
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| * Dotcom Bust
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| * Reemergence of people who care about liberty and freedom (or institutional independence and autonomy)
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| ** Social movements again
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| ** Governments in Europe/S. America/etc.
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| == Academic Work ==
| | - there's huge variation in success of our projects along any access. |
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| Most academic social science has basically started where Raymond left off (e.g., von Hippel or Lakhani). i.e., Most researchers start from, "Isn't open source great? How can we understand its success?"
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| But this statement takes that success for granted.
| | determinants from cooperation |
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| * But there are a few awkward facts about this (e.g., Healy and Schussman)
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| In other words, by focusing only on the most successful projects, we are selecting on the dependent variable. From another perspective, we are measuring openness (or open sourceness) in ''legal'' terms while many of the most important barriers may be organizational.
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| I'm religious about free software issues from an ethical position. But I don't believe it's inherently better. I'm concerned instead with how we make it better. I'm interested in looking at the variation in project success and in the barriers to cooperation, sharing, reuse, and recombination -- all those things that von Hippel has already showed can play an important role.
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| Some snapshots or postcards from my work:
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| * Quality and reliance on individuals in Debian
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| * Cultivation of ethics in free software communities
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| * How free became open and everything else under the sun
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| My current work:
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| * Looking at community dynamics in scratch
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| * Trying to connect things back into design implications
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| * "Experiments" in real online communities
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