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The Social Structure of Open Source Development
HulkProtector1 writes "NewsForge has published an interview Tom Chance conducted with Andreas Brand, a sociologist who is studying the free software world. Read the full interview to learn more about Andreas' views on KDE's development model, volunteer recruitment and retention, motivation, work distribution and more. "
But I'd personally like to see a reflection on more open source projects than just 1 or 2.
There are a million+1 projects now. Some with only 2 people, some with hundreds. I'd like to see what the research shows in a larger sampling.
I'm guessing some of the smaller projects (1-10 people) will have different motivational and organizational factors than a larger project. Simply because of the group dynamics.
No really, think about it. You have a core set of guys who are -really- in touch with the new movement (RMS and ESR come to mind), but who tend to upset a lot of "normal" people. Following in their footsteps, you have a slightly larger, more polished set of people; religions call these "disciples" but we tend to call them "maintainers." They decide where the needs of the real world intersect with the tenets of the ideology.
Then there's you and me. Honestly, most of us have no idea about the gory details of the whole thing. We gladly use free and libre and EULA'd software to get along in our daily lives. Some of us are more dedicated than others, and we only run Debian. Or Catholix. Or whatever. No matter which one we choose, it's "The Best One" and all others are inferior in some way.
LUG's as churches, LiveCD's as evangelism... the list goes on and on and on of why Libre and Open Source software are more like a social / religious organization, and less like a goods and services production group.
-theGreater Zealot.
The GPL and other open source licenses are anticompetitive.
... ummm ... "look" into in?
OK, so "viral" is no longer effective - we all saw how MS can happily thrieve among viruses. Let's bring anticompetitive on, maybe we can then "persuade" the DoJ to
Expect this new GPL opinion to make it into MS's unofficial arguments soon.
OK, who broke slashdot? The comments are messed up big time for me: all AC and from random stories. It's even weirder than Slashdot normally, which is pretty scary.
Ha!
religion - a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny;
open source - A method and philosophy for software licensing
philosophy - any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation
You seem to have religion and philosophy confused. Unfortunately this isnt unusual because for most people religion has hijacked their philosophy and ethics.
(source = hyperdictionary.com)
One fact that no liberal and no feminist seems to want to accept is that boys and girls are different
As a liberal (well actually NDP, but that's even further left) feminist I have to butt in.
I accept that men and women are different, not merely in their reproductive capabilities. Yes, males tend to dominate mathematical fields, Females language-based fields. I would argue that this is in part due to innate predispositions and in part due to societal reinforcement. Exactly how much of which is open for debate, but there do seem to be differences.
Yet even if we accept that men *tend* to be better at some skills and women at others it is pretty clear that individuals regularly rise above these tendancies. There are several very good male writers, although writing relies upon language skills, traditionally associated with women. (People always remark on the women who succeed in male-dominated fields, but what about the inverse? No one considers Tolstoy to have been overcoming the burden of his sex when he set pen to paper.)
Moreover, it is strange to assume that far more men are involved in open source developments because they are "better at math" given that the open source community is not just people sitting in cubicles doing math. It is, first, a *community* ergo a social network -- which is one of those things women are alleged to be so interested in. And does software not rely upon language? Should it not have a good user interface? If we accept that men and women tend to be interested in different intellectual challenges, why assume that there is only one kind of challenge in a given problem? Surely the strength open source is that different people are free to tackle the problems they see, the problems that interest them, and that by having a wide variety of people contributing the final product benefits from the variety of the people who worked on it. No?
Surely in open source development, variety and difference in the developers is a good thing, no? So it is worth asking why more women aren't involved, not because of a desire to be pc but because their involvement might produce a more robust product. And isn't that the whole point?
People get all tied up thinking that gender difference is oppressive and bad. I think gender difference is often exaggerated, but that any difference, gender or otherwise, is a survival trait for society. It's no good having everyone think the same way all the time. We need variety, in life as well as software development.
Just my 2 cents.
The Apache head was not happy about this, but there doesn't seem much he can do.
This is a complete copout. Here's a story.
I had two professors in college. One of them would lead class discussions, in which the sizable number of female students would tend to be quieter, and at some quiet point, he would kind of chuckle embarrasedly and say, "you know, it would be great if we heard some more from the women." And right afterwards, maybe a woman would say something out of obligation, but then things would pretty much go the way they were going before.
The other one led a discussion on the very first meeting of the class, and at the end of class, he stood in front of his desk and said this: "Okay, this public service message is for the women in the class. The message is: this was done to you. You were not born like this. When you were little babies in the nursery, you were blabbering and yelling just as much as the little boy babies were. But somewhere in between, something happened. What happened, or why, is not my department exactly. I'm just saying this because, the next time we talk over something in class, I want you to remember it. That's all." Then he gave us our reading assignments.
The moral of the story is: there is something you can do. The thing to do is: something. Something other than a shrug. Talk about the problem, from the beginning, and make it known how you feel and what you expect. Do not be rolled over by the freight train of social convention.
If you don't pretend to be anyone, are you?