The Social Structure of Open Source Development 391
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. "
While we're talking about the social structure... (Score:4, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Funny)
(This *is* meant to be flamebait -- and posted anonymously, so I don't ruin my chances with the girl who reads
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:3, Informative)
Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds like a relatively innocent thing to say to me. I could see where you could misinterpret it... but it has sunk into the world's consciousness as a proven fact that the president of
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Lighten up.
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2, Informative)
Obviously, they are not neurologists, but each has an interesting take.
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Slashdot has 76,000 female users! (Score:2, Interesting)
Just guessing, I would guess 30 boys finished. So 30:3? Seeing as how my
Re:Slashdot has 76,000 female users! (Score:2, Interesting)
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, l
Re:Slashdot has 76,000 female users! (Score:1)
Re:Slashdot has 76,000 female users! (Score:1)
Re:Slashdot has 76,000 female users! (Score:1)
Re:Slashdot has 76,000 female users! (Score:1)
Re:Slashdot has 76,000 female users! -- like me? (Score:4, Funny)
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. :)
MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:1, Funny)
MOD PARENT DOWN!
Re:Slashdot has 76,000 female users! -- like me? (Score:2, Funny)
Street address would be fine.
In all seriousness though, while your parents don't understand your field of choice, they surely call you every time they need help. I hate getting calls that start with "Hi, you don't know me, but I am your moms friends hamsters former-owners uncles sons 2nd best friend, would you fix my computer? It doesn't work good."
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:1)
vs.
"average alpha geek"
How many average alpha geeks land up as a mentally ill and drug addicted client? Does she server food to any of her former coworkers? A female friend of mine left CS for a similar reason.
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Oh if I could only remember how many times I've made that typo
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
Maybe humor is a difficult concept.
Seriously, I'm about as ardently anti-sexist as they come, and even I understood the humor (that BTW was clearly intended as much as a tongue-in-cheek criticism of sexism in the technical fields as anything else)
So chill.
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
A joke can do two things when dealing with serious issues. It can be used to smooth over the issue and allows us to dismiss the issue. Or it can highlight the issue, and open it up for debate.
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
What about theta g33k5?
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
You know, that the average woman and the average man think differently? There's a reason my wife who got into Computer Engineering at 16 yrs old and studied VAX assembly language still asks me to change the settings on our home machine -- she couldn't be bothered to do it herself. She's more than capable, but the itch isn't there.
I meet guy after guy doing OSS work and they're "scratching an itch", and when we discu
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1, Flamebait)
What a surprise. Losers who totally fucked up in everything they tried are less arrogant than people who stand at the top of a successful, well paid, career?
Your girlfriend seems to be have a rather intolerant personality. She needs to work with people that are clearly inferior to her, because she can't stand the sugestion that anyone could be superior to herself. If she can't stand the occasional banter from co
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
are you implying that people who are mentally ill are to blame for their condition?
Your girlfriend seems to be have a rather intolerant personality. She needs to work with people that are clearly inferior to her, because she can't stand the sugestion that anyone could be superior to herself.
very insightful! by this "logic" we can assume that progr
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
If you really have issues with being referred to as a "geek" or a "nerd," why do you read Slashdot: News for Nerds?
Alpha geeks are annoying - what's new? (Score:2)
So how does this affect women in the technical workplace? A lot of your "alpha geeks" are snotty, condescending jerks. Men brush it off as a personality annoyance and accept it as part of the cost of interacting with those peopl
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
Did you read the second line? It was meant as a joke...
(This *is* meant to be flamebait -- and posted anonymously, so I don't ruin my chances with the girl who reads
Why must everything be taken as an insult?
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:4, Funny)
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.
"Appear to be male"? (Score:1, Funny)
Why do most Open Source developers, hackers and software hobbyists appear to be male?
Dunno - perhaps it has something to do with a generally barrel-like physique and likelihood of facial hair. Careful, though - appearances can be deceiving.
Re:"Appear to be male"? (Score:2)
Two out of three aint bad?
Re:"Appear to be male"? (Score:2)
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
Because most developers are male, nothing special about the open source ones (in this regard)
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
Uh, because most computer geeks are male.
Next!
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
Re:Why are most FOSS developers male? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why are most FOSS developers male? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Apache head was not happy about this, but there doesn't seem much he can do.
This is a complete copout. Here's a story.
I had two professors in college. One of them would lead class discussions, in which the sizable number of female students would tend to be quieter, and at some quiet point, he would kind of chuckle embarrasedly and say, "you know, it would be great if we heard some more from the women." And right afterwards, maybe a woman would say something out of obligation, but then things woul
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
When my son plays with dolls, they [the dolls, under his control] fight and build things. When my daughter plays with trucks, the mommy truck takes care of the baby trucks. The boy builds guns and forts with legos, the girl builds houses for the mommy truck and the baby trucks.
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:3, Insightful)
As a liberal (well actually NDP, but that's even further left) feminist I have to butt in.
I accept that men and women are different, not merely in their reproductive capabilities. Yes, males tend to dominate mathematical fields, Females language-based fields. I would argue that this is in part due to innate predispositions and in part due to societal reinforcement. Exactly how much of which is open for
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Just a thought.
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:2)
An opinion from a woman. (Score:2)
Next time you go shopping, go to the toy section of the store and look how boys' toys and girls' toys treat the subject of electricity. Last time I went, the boy's section had a toy that showed boys how to make a circuit, and the only toy in the girls' section that had anything to do with electricity was a magic genie lamp that required batteries to "magically" glow. And t
Men use grey matter, women use white matter (Score:3, Informative)
From the press release:
"In general, men have approximately 6.5
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Ask Harvard University President Lawrence Summers [uchicago.edu]
Then again, maybe you better not [harvard.edu]Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Re:While we're talking about the social structure. (Score:1)
Heh...
It's an interesting article (Score:4, Insightful)
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:It's an interesting article (Score:2)
Ditto. And correllate to some other factors as well. A Linux has a huge potential installed base, because it is a general-use application. But what about something like PCGen [sourceforge.net], which is very focused, yet still has a pretty large development group (from what I can tell). Then projects with only a few maintainers. There is also the dynamic of rewriting an existing application to a new language that may alter results (li
It's a religion. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's a religion. (Score:1)
I haven't seen any free software EULA, have you? The GPL is a distribution license, so are the BSD licenses. You don't have to accept those to use the software.
religions are magic (Score:3, Insightful)
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:religions are magic (Score:1)
Also, you may have noticed that many of the great philosophers spend a lot of time ruminating about god, existence, and other domains of religion. Why shouldn't religion be allowed to return the favor?
I certainly do wish everything was as clear cut
Re:It's a religion. (Score:2)
The only meme I can really find in common is respecting the leadership; but forks of religions only happen by people so up in the hierarchy as to be di
Re:It's a religion. (Score:1)
In religion it takes the form of "Follow these teachings or you're not 'saved'." In FOSS it takes the form of "Use this license or you're not 'free'.".
And, of course, as in all other worlds, you have two endpoints for people to lie between.
-theGreater.
Re:It's a religion. (Score:2)
Re:It's a religion. (Score:1)
Re:It's a religion. (Score:2)
Re:It's a religion. (Score:2)
The prime example is communism (as opposed to socialism). The state is revered as holy, the works or Marx are sacred, party leaders are priests, etc.
Many geeks are agnostics or atheists, and I think there is a s
Wrong, it is more like public interest association (Score:1)
Public interest groups have all these traits also, but feed a more "material" needs.
Religions tend to have mutually-exclusive licenses whereas interest groups do not.
Re:It's a religion. (Score:2)
The religious comparison may be a sore spot for those of us who see religious belief as usually irrational or anti-rational. But many social movements contain elements of anti-rationalism. For example, Communism isn't a religion, but its statements about the workings of his
Recruitment (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are working on an open source project, what has caused you to join an open source project?
-Benjamin Meyer
Re:Recruitment (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Recruitment (Score:1)
Playing together (Score:2)
I enjoy programming. It's more fun and rewarding when you do it with other people.
Simple as that.
Re:Recruitment (Score:1)
Re:Recruitment (Score:1)
Most of the time people slowly get involved with the project. Enter the forums/mailing lists, post suggestions, perhaps start fixing a few bugs or help other people out, slowly start to implement bigger features.. And before you realize it, people will be asking you for comments about their idea's. That's how it kind-of happened to me, but I also had an itch to scratch and the developers appeared to be busy wi
Who broke Slashdot? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who broke Slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who broke Slashdot? (Score:2)
Another idea for a fun project (Score:4, Funny)
Then just find the lowest average number, and that person is the center of the open source social structure.
Re:Another idea for a fun project (Score:2)
Whaaaaaaaaaa? No way, he couldn't have... oh, he didn't. Thank God.
A new book: Opensource Society And Its Enemies. (Score:1)
C++ and reuse (Score:2)
One can reuse code in any language. It is source code availability that enables that, not C++; even OO in general seems to conduce to reuse but frequently leads to problems such as the weak base objects.
C++, with its huge complexity, is a handicap -- Java and C# are still complex but at least they try to be a little bit simpler, not to mention definetly better things such as functional
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
Perhaps not being a native English speaker I misused the word -- I meant a language you need to be a language lawyer to be effective in.
See why Debian was unable to distribute KDE...
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
If Debian had problems with KDE, it really is Debian's problem. I don't think that KDE's licensing has ever been "confusing". Don't try to blame Debian's problems on KDE.
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
No, Trolltech Qt's license wasn't compatible with the GNU GPL. Go inform yourself before replying.
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
Like I said: Debian's problems are Debian's problems.
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
That is it, they couldn't. It took years to make Trolltech change Qt's license to something GNU GPL-compatible.
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
Yes they could. Or as the original KDE-announcement (from 1996) says: "Since a few weeks a really great new widget library is available free in source and price for free software development.".
Obviously Qt could be freely used for free software even back then. And KDE did just that, and TT had ZERO problems with it. Hell, they endorsed it! TT changed their license because some people started whining about it. But KDE (which was GPL-licensed) had been using it for quite some time
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
The kernel is written in C, Gnome in Objective C, KDE in C++; there's a reason all large-scale projects (correct me if I'm wrong but atm I can't think of any well known 2-3 million lines+ project in Java/C#) use "arcane" languages
And KDE is (L)GPL, Qt is GPL (among others) and it's been that way for years now I really don't see what you're talking about
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
And suffering, see how progress slowed down and Linus found himself unable to produce stable kernels in 2.6.
But yes, C is a lot less arcane than C++
Gnome is plain C. And yes, Objective C is quite less arcane than C++
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
Not really, they wrote their own Objective C look-alike.
C++ is one of the most popular languages out there; to call it arcane just because you don't like it is unfair. Yes C++ offers lots of possibilities to screw things up but it's also one of the most powerful languages. If you do a C++ project it may be more important to think about the structure of the program before you start hacking and to be more careful about the details than with Java but KDE got that right (And a good IDE can he
Re:C++ and reuse (Score:2)
You don't know what you're talking about. They didn't. It is just OO-like functions you access in plain C.
So popular everyone spends loads of time trying to fix it, and it grows and grows...
I criticised the claim you need C++ to reuse
Confused (Score:3, Interesting)
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
volunteers/contributors ratio? (Score:1)
In the case of Linux, I think currently all of the most important contributors (who, on the whole, are responsible for almost all of the incoming core code) are now getting paid for their work on Linux (at OSDL, Red Hat, SUSE, IBM etc.). The same is true for Mozilla (Mozilla Foundation, Oracle, IBM, and now, fa
Re:volunteers/contributors ratio? (Score:2)
It's a vanishingly small number. It gets larger if you include KDE work done in spare time by Troll Tech developers paid to work on Qt, but even so it's overwhelmingly a volunteer effort.
Starting Open Source Software Projects For Dummies (Score:2)
No one's writing one of those, because understanding social organizations is something that's not best left to "social scientists. There's no mention in the article of mathematical modelling, or anything else that would mark him as a serious student, it's just an opinion puff-piece that happens to mention KDE.
There's a lot of work out there that's
Re:The social structure of open source development (Score:1, Interesting)
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 propriet
That's a new one (Score:1, Insightful)
OK, so "viral" is no longer effective - we all saw how MS can happily thrieve among viruses. Let's bring anticompetitive on, maybe we can then "persuade" the DoJ to
Expect this new GPL opinion to make it into MS's unofficial arguments soon.
Re:That's a new one (Score:1, Interesting)
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 - i
Re:The social structure of open source development (Score:2)
> 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?
Imagine a product that's $200 cheaper than said product. How dare it sell for less?
If a proprietary product is truly greatly better than an GPL
Re:Details. (Score:2)