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. "

Comments

While we're talking about the social structure...

[GillBates0]

Why do most Open Source developers, hackers and software hobbyists appear to be male? The bias is easily visible on most open source websites, discussion boards (/.), and even in the Credits/Contributors list of Linux and other projects.

Not intended to be flamebait, and from a quick readthrough, the article did not seem to address this inequality. We do hear a bevy of jokes about no females reading /....but what really is the reason?

Re:The social structure of open source development

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait until open source development projects get slapped with a patent lawsuit from MS, we'll see who's laughing then.

Does ECMA allow patenting of standards? I know IETF does. If so, then MS has a huge advantage. It can use its corporate presence to stamp out this open-source rubbish, together with its ridiculous notions of so-called 'freedom', and let the silent majority of developers get on with making money from software.

The GPL and other open source licenses are anticompetitive. Imagine a proprietary product has to compete against a open-source one which (heaven forfend) happened to be better and with greater market share. How on earth is the proprietary one meant to compete and provide compatibility/better features, when it has to use open standards?

Software has zero replication cost, but the cost of building it is huge. We can't all live on customisation, consultancy and support contracts. This is especially true given the problems of outsourcing, etc. The American software economy depends on widespread GPL-incompatibility. I look to Microsoft, Adobe and others for decisive leadership.

Let the patent wars begin.

Recruitment

[IceFox]

The article touches on recruitment and how in open source developers come and go. So might as well ask /.

If you are working on an open source project, what has caused you to join an open source project?

-Benjamin Meyer

Re:Recruitment

[PhilRod]

I'd like to widen the question that icefox put, to
As a member of an open source team, what attitude and methods do you use towards recruitment?

I think this touches on a wider issue relating to open source (free software, peer-directed projects, whatever you want to call it), namely how we deal with the less strictly technical aspects of the software itself. Most of the discussion on, say, OSS mailing lists is directed towards coding, as of course it should be, since it's the software itself that is the object of the exercise. But there are plenty of other important and useful ways of improving software and people's experience of it: documentation, usability considerations, promotion, and so on.

Improving these aspects of software in an open-source model seems to be a very different task to writing code. It requires 'soft' skills - the ability to attract people, help them learn the ropes, and then retain them as contributors. In a business model, of course, you can pay people to do the marketing and the usability testing (say), but in an open project, you can't force people to do what they don't want to.

As a contributor to KDE for a few years now, I think we as a project have perhaps thought too little about these wider things, but what have other projects done about them? Do you rely on companies to sponsor developers (not necessarily coders!) who can work on these less popular areas, or do you require coders to provide, say, documentation or usability testing for their apps?

Slashdot has 76,000 female users!

[BigDogCH]

I don't know, but when I was going through CS classes we started with about a 50:50 ratio of boys to girls. Okay, maybe 60:40. I only know of 3 girls out of maybe 30 that finished.

Just guessing, I would guess 30 boys finished. So 30:3? Seeing as how my /. number is 760290, does that mean /. has 76,290 female users? Wow!

Re:Slashdot has 76,000 female users!

[Anonymous Coward]

here's one?

dude, we're out there. you boys are so thick-skulled, you don't see that we don't preface every comment we make with "hey, i'm a girl!"

because that would be stupid.

anyway, i agree with the CS class ratio, but more interesting to me was the stratification. there were sort of three 'levels' of CS-type degrees at my UG. businessy computer stuff, regular CS, and engineering. in the beginning, when we all shared classes, there were lots of girls, but they almost all ended up in the businessy, less hard-core degree. i was in regular CS - would have done engineering if i hadn't spent half my college career being a music major - and the ratio was as described above. i'm not sure if there were any girls in the engineering - maybe one or two.

it's not that we're not taught to believe we can do science. we're just taught to believe we can't/shouldn't do the REALLY hard science. and/or our older brothers hogged the PC Jr when we were kids.

Re:While we're talking about the social structure.

[Frymaster]

Obviously, boys are smarter than girls.

maybe attitudes like this are the reason there aren't that many women in programming.

my girlfriend spent four years at school and three years in the industry going from one software shop before she finally quit the whole biz because of attitudes like that. she works at a homeless shelter now and says that her mentally ill and drug addicted clients are easier to work with than the average alpha geek.

Re:While we're talking about the social structure.

[Otter]

That was an interesting incident, wasn't it? At the very epicenter of academia, Summers says something controversial and the response isn't "I disagree!", it isn't "You're wrong!", it's "You must never say such a thing! It is forbidden! Now grovel for forgiveness!".

If this is the way professors treat the freaking President of Harvard freaking University, is it a surprise that undergrads feel inhibited from speaking freely in class?

Re:Why are most FOSS developers male?

[softcoder]

Perhaps you should ask the project lead for Mozilla, who is I believe, female. At the 2004 OsCON they had a panel about FOSS volunteers. The Apache lead mentioned that there were two groups of people who tended to drop out early: women, and Japanese. In his opinion, they were driven away by the flame wars on the mailing lists. Women, and Japanese, were just not comfortable with the level of 'discussion'. The Apache head was not happy about this, but there doesn't seem much he can do.

Re:While we're talking about the social structure.

[Money for Nothin']

We do hear a bevy of jokes about no females reading /....but what really is the reason?

Women tend to be more social than men? Men have a greater enjoyment of technical problems than women? Boys play with dump trucks and military characters and Legos and Erector sets (more individual, technically-creative toys), while girls play with Barbies and lipstick and new clothes (more social, more fashionably-creative items)?

Some would say it's because men ostracize women in the workplace, but that ignores the fact that men go into Computer Science schools in a ratio of about 20:1, and engineering schools (what I've seen of them, anyway) in ratio of like 10:1 or 5:1. Perhaps this stems from earlier-childhood ostracization from letting girls play with dump trucks and BB guns and Legos and other activities which might turn them into a "tomboy"?

Or perhaps it's simply a product of genetic evolution which tells men to take technical problems in greater proportion than women (evolutionary history summed up as follows -- man: hunt for food and fend off predators and other men using innovative killing tools; woman: cook food, wash clothes, take care of kids)?

We may all be equal under the law (as we should be), but let's not kid ourselves - men and women *are* different, and that fact is as bluntly-obvious as the fact that we have different sex organs. And the difference, IMO, probably manifests itself in other factors of "manhood" or "womanhood" as well.

(Disclaimer: these are all vague sociological generalizations which will not apply in specific scenarios. But isn't that what sociology is about - vague over-generalization? :P )

Confused

[webhat]

It seems like everytime I read an article it's another social comentary on the structure of F/OSS, what's up with that?

It's strange how at one time the F/OSS community is a marginalized group under attack from every large company who thinks it's destroying their market share and now it's so important that everybody and their dog is writing about how wonderful the development structure is.

I'm not saying it's not wonderful, but I'm not saying it is either. Then again it seems that everybody and their dog is saying that too.

Oh, and on the comment: "I think that a democratic election is better than a dictatorship."

Is that a dig at Bush or a dig at Linus? Personally, and some research back me up on this, I think that dictatorships are sometimes needed to get the ball rolling. Then once the dictator gets too big for their boots and there's a revolt. In the case of Linus he elected deputies to help him with the leadership role.

Here's a quote I borrowed under the GFDL, from Wikipedia:

Edmund Burke:

"I cannot help concurring [e.g., with Aristotle, inter alios] that an absolute democracy, no more than an absolute monarchy, is not to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government. They think it rather the corruption and degeneracy than the sound constitution of a republic."

See now I'm a F/OSS social commentary writer too... ;)

BTW, the original confusion, see subject, came from the fact that I didn't see the obligatory OSTG warning in the message, it's almost as important and as much a part of /. as the jibes about Will Wheaton in the story above.

Re:That's a new one

[Anonymous Coward]

Anticompetitive? Then why is Microsoft's biggest worry that its OS and products are losing market to open-source ones? This is called competition where I'm from.

One also has to remember that the only reason we promote competition is because we don't know how to force people to produce good products otherwise. Here, we've found a way. The only competition lost is that between companies creating the same thing in parallel because they don't share with each other, which has nothing to do with these issues - in fact companies would have more time to work on new products if they didn't have to waste time reinventing the wheel.