Kieran Healy

Open Source

Here I am at the HBS/MIT Sloan Free/Open Source Software Conference, able to leech off of the Harvard Business School wireless network. We just finished talking about motives for participation in Open Source, and of course for the economists the question is “Why are these people volunteering?” The answer (again for the economists) is that they must be getting something out of it. This is perfectly reasonable as far as it goes (though the impulse to treat co-operation and volunteering as a weird social anomaly has its pathological side). But although the panel was organized around the question of Developer motivation, and we heard some good data on motives for participation, I remain unconvinced that framing the problem this way is a the most productive approach.

The problem is that motives are too labile. They are fluid and shifting and—worst of all—if you ask people why they’re doing x, they’ll usually give you a list of motives as long as your arm, or check off most items on the list of motives that you present them with. This showed up in much of the data the speakers presented—the histograms were all flat, so to speak, with most people checking off most motives.

This is consistent with reseach in the voluntary/nonprofit sector (where the existence of voluntary activity is not thought of as some weird anomaly to be explained away). There we find that (1) motives are too plural, with the limited exception of (2) altruistic motives, which aren’t culturally plausible. (If I sell my kidney to a stranger for $20,000 people can understand my action even if they disapprove; if I give it away to a stranger they’re likely to think I need psychiatric help.) A much more robust approach focuses on mechanisms of organizational recruitment and retention. The best predictor of whether you’ve volunteered time or money recently is whether you’ve been asked. So we need to know much more about the organizational side. Volunteerism has been a constant in the software/hacker community since its inception, yet the open-source explosion is a comparatively recent affair. My intuition is that the real causal traction is in social organization or institutions, not individual motives. Interestingly, this view is supported by some of the people involved in the comunity. Jeff Bates, of OSDN, was a commenter on the last session and said he wanted to know how a project aggregates people. This seems like exactly the right question to me.

The science fiction fan community and the software community overlap by quite a bit. The sf community has long had a gift culture orientation with volunteerism highly valued and esteemed by others in that community. Publishing and giving away fanzines was fundamental to the community in its early days and volunteers running sf conventions is highly important now. (The sub-subculture of media zines and fandom came from a different ‘place’ and has a different orientation.) The World Science Fiction Convention, held every year on or near Labor Day, runs 5 or 6 thousand people and is run entirely by volunteers who also have to buy a membership in the convention. They may get that refunded if the con ends up with a surplus, but they gotta buy it first. They are also often contributing professional expertise which could cost anywhere for $50/hour to hundreds/hour.

We look at this volunteerism as contributing to the community which we enjoy so greatly and we get great egoboo for doing so. (Egoboo: postive strokes, esteem from our peers, that kinda thing.) The strong overlap between the sf community and the computer geeks may have helped encourage some of these attitudes. Or maybe not. At any rate what I get out of your gift/volunteer culture is intangible, but very real nevertheless: egoboo and the knowledge of having having helped make possible a culture and community I enjoy

MKK

Hey how did you figure out the HBS wifi leech system?

You have to share with the rest of us….

:)

K

Open Source

OPEN SOURCE….Kieran Healy has an interesting post about the Open Source movement and asks what I think is the key question: why do people volunteer to work on Open Source projects for free?The best predictor of whether you’ve volunteered time…

I’ll be honest – there’s one thing that makes me wonder if open source will be viable, and it’s something that many of its defenders tend to miss:

If open source is the end all and be all of software development, then why does the movement feel the need to convert at knifepoint?

I wonder how many of you have taken the time to ever read the GNU Public Licence (GPL)? If you did, you would realize how wrong it is. First, the GPL is viral. What that means it that if you were to use code from a GPL program in your program, you don’t get a choice about what licence you use – your program is GPL code. Why do you think that bison (a GPL parser generator) uses a modified version of the GPL? Because under the standard licence, any parser made by bison would immediately be under the GPL, and so would any program using that parser. There would be no commercial viability for a tool that makes anything it is used on governed by the GPL.

The other major problem with the GPL is that the creator loses any distribution rights whatsoever. Yes, I know the licence says that the creator may set any price that they wish. But the GPL also gives the end user the same rights. With peer to peer file sharing networks the way they are now, a GPL program that was even moderately popular – a program that could make the programmer a moderate living if he controlled distribution rights – would be obtained for free, not bought. The programmer also has no control over how his project is used – something that has probably killed quite a few projects. (Read up on the bnetd issue from a year ago – Blizzard and Vivendi would most likely have been willing to let bnetd sail under their radar had it not been for the fact that a splinter group made a variant that would allow the online play of the beta of Warcraft III - a splinter formed because the core bnetd devs chose not to add that functionality for that reason.)

It’s interesting how much Stallman pushes to have people accept that Linux is under the GPL - something that is considered to this day to be a fringe notion. And I wonder exactly where open source would be today if it wasn’t for the GPL. The GPL is the one thing that makes me shy away from open source, considering how much of open source is under the GPL.

Kieran and I had a great chat about this. By and large, I agree.

Altruism and volunteerism drives economists nuts. If you buy the simplistic view that incentives drive all behavior, you will always search for incentives. The point is people volunteer all the time and the motives can be heterogenous.

As Walt Scacchi from UC Irvine noted, the research on Open Source has not come up with a unique motive. Most of the work presented at the conference read like a generic list from a textbook.

Of course, one could argue that there is nothing unique about Open Source…. :-)

AngelKnight2780, you obviously did not read the GPL or study the F/OSS community well enough because you are falling prey to some of the most high profile, and widely debunked, misconceptions.

There would be no commercial viability for a tool that makes anything it is used on governed by the GPL.

Your example Bison, a parser, is a special case. First, the GPL limits (1) modifying the original program (2) including the source code of a program into a new program and (3) linking, which is technically equivalent to (2). Additionally, there is an operating system clause in there that mediates even this requirement.

GNU Emacs hardly require that all documents and code created with it be GPLed anymore than Visual Basic blocks people from writing free software with it. Your fears of contamination are overblow and, in the context of the rest of the message, come close to FUD.

With peer to peer file sharing networks the way they are now, a GPL program that was even moderately popular – a program that could make the programmer a moderate living if he controlled distribution rights – would be obtained for free, not bought.

Two major oversites here: (1) F/OSS is testiment to the fact that paying programmer is not a requirement for the production of software and (2) Paying programmers need not be dependent on complete control of distribution.

There are plenty of people who write free software soley for the money they make. I’m not one of them but I’ve made very decent living writing software without control of distribution rights for the past half decade. GPLed software in fact.

The programmer also has no control over how his project is used – something that has probably killed quite a few projects.

I’d say it has “saved” just as many.

If you hold free software up to the business logic of proprietary companies based on highly individualized control, it will appear flawed and that is hardly suprising. If you hold free software up as an example of a new form of software production with it’s own, distinct business logic, you are in a position to critically evaluate the nature of free software production.

It works. It develops good software and it employed programmers. I have the tax returns to prove it.

AngelKnight2780 has been posting this on Calpundit, as well. Arguing with him/her/it is futile, merely leading to repetitions of the assertion. DNFTEC.