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:While we're talking about the social structure.

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, boys are smarter than girls.
(This *is* meant to be flamebait -- and posted anonymously, so I don't ruin my chances with the girl who reads /. ... I know you're out there baby, and I love you!)

It's an interesting article

[digitalgimpus]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's safe to draw an analogy to Family Guy:

Lois: I guarantee you a man made that commercial.
Peter: Of course a man made it. It's a commercial Lois, not a delicious thanksgiving dinner.

It's a religion.

[theGreater]

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.

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?

Who broke Slashdot?

[BenjyD]

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.

Re:Who broke Slashdot?

[tcopeland]

I've seen this happen before; I think it's just a bot posting old comments to this store as an AC. And I bet his IP address will get blocked soon...

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?

Another idea for a fun project

[dkleinsc]

Determine the person at the center of the open source society, using a Erdos-style numbering scheme. e.g. Joe Blow worked on sendmail with Jane Smith who worked on zlib with RMS gives Joe Blow a RMS Number of 2.

Then just find the lowest average number, and that person is the center of the open source social structure.

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.

religions are magic

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

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 )

Re:Slashdot has 76,000 female users! -- like me?

[mgoss]

In my CS classes, it's more like a 10:1 ration of guys to gals, but that's a fairly small private university.

So, I'm female. I love computers, programming, linux, gentoo... hopefully in the future there will be more and more people like me.

I mean, there's got to be some females to help pass on geekiness to their kids. But I just don't think my mom would understand an e-mail that said something to the effect of "emerging package baby, nine month compilation time!"

By the way, geeky pick-up lines are the best. And I find all you guys very amusing.

PS, no you can't have my e-mail address. :)

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.