Openness: May 2004 Archives
From From Adam Smith to Open Source:
"The Internet is a manifestation of the validity of Adam Smith's theories, as is the growth of Linux, itself, Young argued. The way in which the Internet works and was created is as a distributed system to which multiple self-interests contributed. This resulted in something that was better than any one individual company or government could have ever created."
"Operating-system adoption is driven by the availability of applications, according to Young, which is something that, in early days of its existence, Linux did not have. That said, he added, it was the Internet, itself, with applications like the Apache Web Server, DNS and Sendmail -- all free and open source endeavors -- that serve as further proof of Adam Smith's theory is applied to the growth of the free and open source software movement. "
"The Internet was the killer app that drove the adoption of Linux," said Young."
No comments... the argument is self explanatory.
The qualitative study (Scacchi, 2002) I have selected to critique is published in an electrical engineering oriented scholarly peer-review journal. The author is aware of his quantitative oriented audience and thus from the very beginning sets the expectations that the study is “… not about hypothesis testing or testing the viability of a perspective software engineering methodology or notational form” (p. 24). Similarly to Lincoln and Guba (1985) in defining naturalistic inquiry in terms of what it is not, Scacchi deems it necessary to define a qualitative research in terms that it is not quantitative research. The tensions emerging from the struggle to present non-quantitative type study to a quantitative expecting audience are pervasive throughout the article. Because of these tensions, in the attempt not to alienate his audience, the author has either decided to take many shortcuts—showing in the lack of proper definition and utilization of qualitative methods; or, the author himself is in the process of becoming familiar with various qualitative methods. In the rest of this paper I will concentrate on these struggles, attempts, and what could have been done better, not forgetting that maybe what the author has done is a purposefully chosen middle ground because the audience was not prepared for the full switch from quantitative to qualitative methodology and methods.
The core of this article is to understand the nature and the processes around requirements for the development of open source software (Scacchi, p. 24). Since the open source development framework is a new approach to software development, the author rightfully suggests qualitative methods for doing so: “… investigation of the socio-technical processes, work practices and community forms found in the open source software development. The purpose of this investigation, over several years, is to develop narrative, semi-structured (i.e. hypertextual) and formal computational models of these processes, practices and community forms” (p. 24). The preceding quote also suggest a mix method approach where the findings of the qualitative part of the study (i.e. ‘investigation’) would inform the quantitative part in building computational models. However, this article is restricted to the investigative part of the effort.
