Talks/FLOSS Overview and Research: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:51, 13 November 2009

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:

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

Early History

RMS Printer story / MIT AI Lab (familiar to many people)
Emacs Software Sharing Commune
Free software was a reclaimist movement for freedom
Strong orientation as a social movement calling for control and autonomy

As so there is no ambiguity. I'm in this camp and this is why I do what I do.

Early Structure

Free Software Definition
Free Software Foundation
Copyleft
GPL
GNU Project and the creation of a replacement for UNIX

Open Source

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
Open Source Initiative started by Eric Raymond (author of Cathedral and the Bazaar), Bruce Perens and others
Open Source Definition
Motivations emphasizing the pragmatic benefits of fee software
- OS can be seen as a development methodology
- "A inherently better way to produce better software"
"Opposite of a schism"

Going Mainstream (ups and downs)

Perhaps the major breakthrough was with Netscape releasing code to their browser in 1998
Many other companies ended up getting carried away in the boom (VA Linux (LNUX has single biggest IPO) (Krantz and Henry, 1999)
Dotcom Bust
Reemergence of people who care about liberty and freedom (or institutional independence and autonomy)
- Social movements again
- Governments in Europe/S. America/etc.

Academic Work

Most academic work basically started where Raymond left off (e.g., von Hippel or Lakhani)
But there are a few awkward facts about this (e.g., Healy and Schussman)

It's still early days and most people start with, "Isn't openness great?", how can understand it's success?

But this work ends up selecting on the dependent variable.

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 Hipple has already showed can play an important role.

Some snapshots or postcards from my work:

Quality and reliance on individuals in Debian
Cultivation of ethics in free software communities
How free became open and everything else under the sun

My current work:

Looking at community dynamics in scratch
Trying to connect things back into design implications
"Experiments" in real online communities

@@ Line 28: / Line 28: @@
 == My Biased History of FLOSS ==
-FLOSS philosophy
+=== Early History ===
-- play up the argument between free versus open
+* RMS Printer story / MIT AI Lab (familiar to many people)
-- so here's my observation
+* [http://www.novalis.org/history-of-fsm/slide-24.html Emacs Software Sharing Commune]
+* Free software was a ''reclaimist'' movement for freedom
+* Strong orientation as a social movement calling for control and autonomy
-free verus proprietary is largely a legal distinction
+As so there is no ambiguity. I'm in this camp and this is why I do what I do.
-the argument at the heart of open source is that legal distinction leads
+=== Early Structure ===
-to stuff that is inherently better.
-i believe it's ok to religious position on religious things.
+* [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Free Software Definition]
+* [http://www.fsf.org Free Software Foundation]
+* [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ Copyleft]
+* [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html GPL]
+* [http://www.gnu.org GNU Project] and the creation of a replacement for UNIX
-so if i want to say that using software that is free is ethically
+=== Open Source ===
-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
+* 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
+* [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
+* [http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php Open Source Definition]
+* Motivations emphasizing the pragmatic benefits of fee software
+** OS can be seen as a development methodology
+** "A inherently better way to produce better software"
+* "Opposite of a schism"
-in fact, i think there's a huge amount of variation in how successful
+=== Going Mainstream (ups and downs) ===
-these projects are.
-social science, and engineering, and a lot of other areas, have
+* Perhaps the major breakthrough was with Netscape releasing code to their browser in 1998
-for the most part listened to the raymond story and taken it seriously.
+* Many other companies ended up getting carried away in the boom (VA Linux (LNUX has single biggest IPO) (Krantz and Henry, 1999)
+* Dotcom Bust
+* Reemergence of people who care about liberty and freedom (or institutional independence and autonomy)
+** Social movements again
+** Governments in Europe/S. America/etc.
-but by considering apache, and linux, etc., we are selecting on the
+== Academic Work ==
-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
+* Most academic work basically started where Raymond left off (e.g., von Hippel or Lakhani)
-failing completely.
+* But there are a few awkward facts about this (e.g., Healy and Schussman)
-there is huge bias in the types of people who are being "empowered" in
+It's still early days and most people start with, "Isn't openness great?", how can understand it's success?
-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
+But this work ends up selecting on the dependent variable.
-software freedom..
-so the open source position might be:
+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 Hipple has already showed can play an important role.
-- there's huge variation in success of our projects along any access.
+Some snapshots or postcards from my work:
+* Quality and reliance on individuals in Debian
+* Cultivation of ethics in free software communities
+* How free became open and everything else under the sun
-determinants from cooperation
+My current work:
+* Looking at community dynamics in scratch
+* Trying to connect things back into design implications
+* "Experiments" in real online communities