Openness: January 2004 Archives
From Spreading the Open Source Gospel to the Masses:
Some highlights:
- Make OSS GUI-based
- Include Everything Needed to Install and Run
- Turn Applications Into Suites
- Simplicity is the Key
In Researcher tests open source ZDNet's Paul Festa provides a very thoughtful report on Walt Scacchi's involvement with open source from research perspective. The article reports the finding of a 10 year long research effort.
Excerpt:
"So what does your research say about the effectiveness of open-source development?
One thing we find with respect to participation is that in a couple of other surveys, 60 percent of open-source software developers who show up as core contributors tend to be contributors to two to 10 other projects. Once you've established a reputation of expertise in a certain area, you can take that to another project, or conversely, people seek out your expertise, because you know how to do certain kinds of things. The overall dynamic that starts to emerge is that there's a social mechanism for the creation of critical mass that lets these projects coalesce and come together, so systems can grow and evolve at rates that far exceed what's predicted by good software practice. Software engineering predicts that projects grow by the inverse square law, meaning that initial growth is fast. It then slows down, and then, with a project shift, you get steady growth.
But in the more successful open-source projects, you get a hockey stick (curved line) on your graph--a longer period of slow growth, then critical mass starts to kick in, and the growth curve starts to shoot up in a greater-than-linear growth rate."
I just came across some interesting pieces on the social aspects of open source software and actor-network theory as a tool to investigating the socio-technological attributes of information and information structures around us. Felix Stalder presents challenging thoughts in Open Source as a social principle and Theories of Socio-Technologies.
