Florian Cramer on Wed, 12 Dec 2001 15:44:01 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development |
Am Wed, 12.Dec.2001 um 00:56:27 +0100 schrieb oliver frommel: > The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development by David Lancashire > First Monday, volume 6, number 12 (December 2001), > URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/lancashire/index.html Thanks for providing the link! To quote from the article and attempt some answers: >> The most fundamental question of all: why does open source >> development occur in the first place? This question applies as well to, say, Nettime (where people freely give away their some of their intellectual work) and all other non-profit volunteer projects. The work of Free Software may just be more pervasive and hence visible to scholars than other volunteer projects because (a) it translates very immediately into everyday use value, (b) its products are infinitely reproducible (also true for Nettime, but not true for all non-Internet volunteer work). - And: Free Software may be the most sophisticated non-profit volunteer project in the way it ensures the free circulation of its products, through the copyleft. David Lancashire's article is an interesting read about the regional distribution of Free Software development, yet as I think problematic or even wrong in many of its core assumptions. But, after of all, I do not see the claim the title makes, "The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development" backed up or elaborated anywhere in the text. While the First Monday article recognizes the entanglement of Free Software development with academia to some degree, it fails, in my view, to interpret this entanglement in cultural and economical terms. Free Software development grew and continues to grow out of student projects at university computer science departments (MIT: GNU project and X11, UC Berkeley: BSD Unix, University of Helsinki: Linux, Universität Tübingen: KDE), and the Free Software copyleft was invented to preserve the traditional academic freedom of information for computer code. Other points: >> The combination of highly-complex and anti-proprietary projects offers >> the only quadrant in which the tension - between economic and cultural >> assumptions about underlying human behavior can meaningfully be >> compared. It is an unfortunate fact then, if a somewhat revealing one on >> its own, that there are so few successful projects which fall into this >> category. To me it rather seems an unfortunate, if a somewhat revealing fact what the author David Lancashire thinks are facts of Free Software: >> Linux, an operating system begun in 1991 in order to provide a >> free alternative to commercial UNIX systems, is the most prominent >> example. The second-most so is undoubtedly GNOME, a free graphical-user >> interface (GUI) for UNIX-compatible systems begun in 1996 to compete >> with the partly privately-owned K-Desktop Environment (KDE) suite for >> UNIX and the completely proprietary Microsoft Windows. - Linux is an operating system kernel started in 1991 which, by itself (i.e. without a compiler, linker, bootloader and core system libraries, init and login daemons and userspace operating system tools), is a non-functional piece of software. As a matter of fact, it was started not to provide a free alternative to proprietary Unices, but a POSIX-compliant (i.e. more functionally more complete) alternative to Andrew Tanenbaum's free Minix operating system. - Not Linux, but GNU was started (in 1984) in order to provide the free alternative to commercial (proprietary) Unix systems. It ended up creating fully functional free equivalents of all core Unix components(compiler, linker, system libraries, userspace operating system tools - the contents of /bin, /sbin and /lib on any "Linux distribution" is almost 100% GNU) except the kernel. It's easy to claim, as in the above quote, there is a lack of "highly-complex and anti-proprietary" Free Software if one doesn't seem to know GNU, the free BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), the X Window System, Mozilla, the Debian GNU/Linux distribution - and wilfully excludes gcc, Perl, Python, PHP, PostgreSQL, Emacs, Apache, sendmail and other highly complex Free Software projects from one's consideration. What's more, Lancashire makes questionable assumptions about Gnome, KDE and Windows; - KDE is not "privately owned" in any way, but one of the most decentralized and non-corporate Free Software projects. Its code is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL); it relies on a library ("Qt") which is developed by a company, but equally available under two Free Software licenses including the GPL since a couple of time. (The fact that Qt was proprietary is history; and Qt never was a part of KDE itself.) - Quite on the contrary to the assumptions of the article, Gnome development is much more in corporate hands: The core developers are employed by Ximian and RedHat (with Ximian, the company of Gnome's founder and project leader Miguel de Icaza, being the major driving force). In addition, Gnome development is supervised by the "Gnome Foundation" whose function is to, official quote, "coordinate releases of GNOME and determine which projects are part of GNOME" and "act as an official voice for the GNOME project" <http://foundation.gnome.org>. Members of the Gnome Foundation include, next to free developers, Ximian, RedHat, Hewlett-Packard and Sun. (Sun also made Gnome the new desktop interface of its proprietary Unix "Solaris".) - The comparison of KDE and Gnome to Windows is mismatched. Both KDE and Gnome are only sets of (a) high-level libraries and component models and (b) basic graphical desktop user components (menus, window manager, file managers, configuration panels, utilities); they are not desktop operating systems on their own, but operate on top of "third party" graphical user interface libraries (Qt and GTK respectively) which in turn operate on top of a "third party" graphical display engine (= the X Window System) which in turn operates on top of "third party" core operating systems (GNU/Linux, *BSD, proprietary Unices etc.). Windows, on the other hand, has always been a unit of a graphical display engine (GDI), graphical user interfaces libraries (MFC), high-level desktop components (OLE/Com) and basic graphical desktop user components (Explorer, Start menu etc.) on top of a core operating system (DOS) and has become a fully self-contained operating system including kernel, OS userspace, graphical display engine at least since Windows NT 3.51. >> With a combined total of over 430 developers, no other two projects >> approach the "authority" of these cases as benchmark examples of >> their kind, This is wrong, and so I doubt the study has a good empirical base. The (truly non-corporate) Debian project <http://www.debian.org> alone has 908 regular developers. In the case of Gnome, the results concerning US-American and non-US-American involvement are likely to be distorted by the fact that it is largely an American project with US-American companies involved - while the (more or less competing) KDE project is largely a project of European developers. (This interesting cultural split has been noted several times on Slashdot.org, an American forum which, sincle a couple of months, shifted its own bias from Gnome to KDE). After all, the study's _economical_ analysis seems questionable to me becaiuse it does not - but should - differentiate between "private"/ "privately owned"/"commercial" on the one hand and "proprietary" one the other (as in the second-last quote). As many Free Software projects - like the RedHat GPL Edition, RedHat's/Cygnus' GNU C compiler, GNU ghostscript, Ximian Gnome, Ximian Evolution, Trolltech's Qt - demonstrate, "commercial" doesn't have to mean "proprietary". In fact, the GNU project involved commercial operations from the beginning on. Richard Stallman financed the Free Software Foundation (and kept himself alive) by expensively selling GNU software on streamer tapes. Interviewed in 1984, the BSD project leader and inventor of the "vi" editor Bill Joy said about GNU Emacs that it was "a nice editor too, but because it costs hundreds of dollars, there will always be people who won't buy it." <http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html> Some other quotes: >> Mexico contributes three times as many developers to Gnome as Linux, >> and Finland (perhaps understandably considering its status as the >> homeland of Linus Torvalds) appears unwaveringly in the Linux camp. The high involvement of Mexicans in Gnome would probably have surprised the author as little as the high involvement of Finns in Linux if he knew that the Gnome project was founded in Mexico by a Mexican, Miguel de Icaza, who continues to be its chief developer. Perhaps another proof for the problematic empirics of the study: >> If this simplified model can explain the relative erosion of open >> source production in the United States, can it explain the rise of it >> Europe? Primarily, it should be clear that if the opportunity cost of >> working on open source projects is lower for European developers than >> their American counterparts, the potential benefits Europeans gain >> from working on them are much greater as well. In a global economy >> lacking perfect labor mobility and characterized by wage-inequality >> across countries, we expect individuals to produce free software if >> doing so can help them shift to a higher wage-level. This >> "fixed-cost" analysis implies (as Lerner and Tirole suggest in their >> paper) that developers may embrace open source work as a way to >> tap-into lucrative corporate networks abroad. This may explain why >> open source development is more popular in Canada than the United >> States, although the data from Europe is inconclusive on this >> question. This also helps to explain why the majority of open source >> developers are relatively young. Older, settled programmers have less >> need to establish a monetizable reputation than their younger, more >> mobile counterparts, given less time in which to amortize its >> immediate costs. My own casual insight into free software hacking rather suggests that (a) free software developers are younger because they are typically students or freshly graduated - and probably more idealistic than older people, (b) free software developers are disproportionally located in Europe because the public acceptance and deployment of free software is higher (in relative terms) in Europe than in the US, resulting in a condition where - many computer science departments make Free Software development part of their curriculum and encourage to write Free Software as C.S. diploma projects. (Linux, for example, was Linus Torvald's diploma project at the C.S. department of the University of Helsinki.) After all, C.S. departments and university computing centers had a pressing need for a free Unix-compatible operating system. (AT&T Unix used to be almost free for universities in the 1970s but was relicensed after the AT&T breakup.) When I first visited meeting of my local Linux User Group in 1996, they took place in the C.S. department of a local university whose department white board proposed several Linux kernel hacks as diploma projects. - Because of the higher deployment of Free Software in Europe, European C.S. graduates may have a higher chance to work in Free Software environments on in-house projects (databases and network infrastructures, embedded controllers etc.). Even if these projects are not for public release, they typically generate free code (or free documentation) on the side, because other free software had to be bugfixed/extended for the project purpose or simply because a certain tool had to be written to accomplish a certain task within a project. While Linus Torvalds and Miguel de Icaza used their reputation to go abroad and work in the U.S., proving that this indeed may be a motivation to write Free Software, this certainly fails as a general model and explanation. - Why, then, is it that Indian and Russian programmers hardly contribute to Free Software development at all? Many Free Software developers I know have left-wing political views though and see work on Free Software as unalienated labour for which they are willing to make economical sacrifices. - A motivation and lifestyle that I guess everyone who works in the arts, academia or media (and probably everyone on Nettime) knows quite well... Florian P.S.: While I have great sympathy for the conclusion that... >> the insights political economists can shed on these movements allow >> for a much more nuanced view of development than is made by advocates >> of post-scarcity gift cultures. ...and think it is necessary (a) to revise Raymond's enthusiastic distortion of the (quite nonideal) gift cultures described by Marcel Mauss (b) not to speak of "post-scarcity economics" by falsly drawing from non-scarce immaterial goods (=software and information which is scarce only in its dependence on material carriers/hardware) to scarce material goods (energy, food, clothing, housing, etc.), it still remains true that, since the 1980s, the software industry has made software artificially scarce by declaring it a material commodity. A questionable and, via the enforcement of "intellectual property" laws, increasingly totalitarian commodification to which Free Software provides an alternative. (- An alternative with the well-known downsides of economic self-exploitation of its producers, although they [still] are in an economically more comfortable position than those working in other fields of culture.) P.P.S.: The fact that the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, probably the largest high-quality collection of Free Software, has grown to six full CD-ROMs/4 GB of compiled binaries (from two CD-ROMs back in 1997) is my empirical evidence against any claim about "the fading altruism in Free Software development". -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold