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| == My Biased History of FLOSS == | | == My Biased History of FLOSS == |
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| === Early History ===
| | FLOSS philosophy |
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| * RMS Printer story / MIT AI Lab (familiar to many people)
| | - play up the argument between free versus open |
| * [http://www.novalis.org/history-of-fsm/slide-24.html Emacs Software Sharing Commune]
| | - so here's my observation |
| * 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.
| | free verus proprietary is largely a legal distinction |
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| === Early Structure ===
| | the argument at the heart of open source is that legal distinction leads |
| | to stuff that is inherently better. |
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| * [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Free Software Definition]
| | i believe it's ok to religious position on religious things. |
| * [http://www.fsf.org Free Software Foundation]
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| * [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 ===
| | 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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| * 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
| | but whether something is better or not is an empirical point |
| * [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
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| * [http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php Open Source Definition]
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| * Motivations emphasizing the pragmatic benefits of fee software
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| ** 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) ===
| | in fact, i think there's a huge amount of variation in how successful |
| | these projects are. |
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| * Perhaps the major breakthrough was with Netscape releasing code to their browser in 1998
| | social science, and engineering, and a lot of other areas, have |
| * Many other companies ended up getting carried away in the boom (VA Linux (LNUX has single biggest IPO) (Krantz and Henry, 1999)
| | for the most part listened to the raymond story and taken it seriously. |
| * 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 ==
| | but by considering apache, and linux, etc., we are selecting on the |
| | dependent variable and it's not clear what we're learning. |
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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?"
| | more problematically, we can't look at all the way that free software is |
| | failing completely. |
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| But this statement takes that success for granted.
| | there is huge bias in the types of people who are being "empowered" in |
| | the sense that they are taking advantage. and those biases tend to fall |
| | along the types of existing gender, class, and national lines. the fsf |
| | board is a bunch of people who look a whole lot like me. |
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| * But there are a few awkward facts about this (e.g., Healy and Schussman)
| | so i'm a partison here. i take an strong ethical position in favor of |
| | software freedom.. |
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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.
| | so the open source position might be: |
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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.
| | - there's huge variation in success of our projects along any access. |
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| Some snapshots or postcards from my work:
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| * Quality and reliance on individuals in Debian
| | determinants from cooperation |
| * 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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