OSS Watch, Tuesday Morning Plenary
I was a couple of minutes late so I can't tell you who the chap giving the very interesting talk on open source and economic research is. (checks website, it's Paul David, of Stanford and the OII) It seems like Stanford have been attempting to build an economic model of open source software creation. Questions are
Micro - where do resources come from, how are they assigned to tasks?
Meso - how are inputs allocated between projects, how does the system match the software to the needs of users?
What are the social costs of OS software? Is there an opportunity cost to participating in OS projects? Is this misallocation of scarce resources? What would it cost closed source vendors to do the same thing? Suggests that the replacement cost of the Debian distribution is about $14Bn
Lecture notes follow
Lecture Notes
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FLOSS - Free / LIbre Open Source Software
How do you sustain the committment of FLOSS projects?
Many sceptics suggest that OS is something of a flash in the pan and it's just a matter of time till reality bites, with financial motives and 'hard headed business decisions' driving out ideological committment and enthusiasm.Survey results of OS developers suggest that most (57%) make no money from it. This suggests that they're getting compensation in a non-monetary means. Suggests that 'ideological' reasons are a major driver behind involvement in the community, people also do it to learn and to socialise with other developers.
However motivations do change and shift around, people often start out with quite weak motives but then tend to develop stronger committment, either to skill improvement or ideology.
When it comes to choosing a given project developers are very pragmatic, they tend to aim for things that are going to be useful to them, or educational for them. This pragmatism increases over time.
How do you sustain the creation of new FLOSS projects?
To what extent are things like SourceForge acting as innovation clusters? Or are people just using it as a place to release existing projects? It seems that there are is a very small number of serial innovators who do regularly start projects. Founders have a lot of entrepreneurial characteristics - they network, they socialise, they communicate well, but not necessarily much more skilled.
How do you sustain maintainability and growth in large projects?
There was an early criticism that OS projects were likely to grow to the stage where they would become impossible to maintain (especially on large projects) since the possible number of connections between files rises exponentially as you add more files. However experience suggests that you can avoid this kind of thing if you try. Surveing large FLOSS projects suggests that file growth is linear and doesn't decelerate over time. In the case of the linux kernel it actually accelerates.
This seems to be possible because code architectures tend to be tree like which makes it more governable. In some cases this has meant a project has had to be redeveloped to meet this requirement. An analysis of the linux code base suggests that this is how it is structured.