Talks/FLOSS Overview and Research

This talk was initially given at Leah Buechley's class on Design for Empowerment on November 13, 2009. The talk was 45 minutes in length.

Overview:

• Very briefly introduce my own qualifications and biases;
• Overview and background on FLOSS with an emphasis on:
  • The key people;
  • Key moments, principles, and documents;
  • 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:
  • I'll show some examples from my own work on FLOSS;
  • ...and talk about how I'm integrating design with social science.

My Background

My background is in work on free software projects over 16 years(!) in a variety of projects:

• Debian
• Software in the Public Interest
• Ubuntu
• FSF

I've made a transition into academic research on the same subjects:

• Anthropological work on the cultivation of ethic in FLOSS communities
• More recently sociological work on community dynamics in FLOSS

My Biased History of FLOSS

FLOSS philosophy

- play up the argument between free versus open - so here's my observation

free verus proprietary is largely a legal distinction

the argument at the heart of open source is that legal distinction leads to stuff that is inherently better.

i believe it's ok to religious position on religious things.

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

but whether something is better or not is an empirical point

in fact, i think there's a huge amount of variation in how successful these projects are.

social science, and engineering, and a lot of other areas, have for the most part listened to the raymond story and taken it seriously.

but by considering apache, and linux, etc., we are selecting on the dependent variable and it's not clear what we're learning.

more problematically, we can't look at all the way that free software is failing completely.

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.

so i'm a partison here. i take an strong ethical position in favor of software freedom..

so the open source position might be:

- there's huge variation in success of our projects along any access.

determinants from cooperation