well i'm sure this number is quite large 24 years later, huh?
I actually don't know... what did people use for servers before Linux? Not to betray my youthful age but I can't even imagine what was going on before Linux became a de-facto standard for headless server runs.
"egoboo" is a new term. While I do think (going into this on a first read-through) there are economic benefits related to labor contributions to OSS, i definitely don't disagree that there is some level of utility in ego that keeps things moving.
in general, "If everybody just _____" is a god-awful way to design markets.
Damn. I may have to find more recent papers, although I will finish reading this one through to the end.
oops. I thought UNIX was a standard (*NIX), not an OS in-and-of-itself.
Now this is ironic. given the inherently OSS nature of UNIX (with 24 years of hindsight) the fact that AT&T/Bell Labs tried to enforce a trademark on it is wild.
Yahaha! The first case of a "cascading" license agreement, where software using GNU had to also, in turn, be GNU.
Two examples off the top of my head:
some things truly are evergreen.
I can get on board with this. Windows development is notoriously a pain in the ass.
This is something else I'd like to look into — the structuring and continuity of OSS foundations.
Certainly worthy of follow-up research.
Interesting to see the term "audience" made in the pre-influencer era.
possibly why i lowered the bar for the blog - i don't have a clue if anybody actually reads it (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
I hope this is elaborated on - I do think that this is the reason why companies will open-source previously private projects, as it opens up bug-fixes and improvements to a broader audience at the expense of (potentially) giving an edge to direct competitors.
One of the things CS students are told constantly is "Contribute to OSS!" and this is the vast majority of the reason. If you don't have the authority of having previously had an engineering position, OSS is a good way to show the results of your project.
While I seriously doubt that any interviewer will look beyond an initial use-case for an OSS project you've contributed to, it does add a signal of "They did contribute!" to the project.
This is crunchy! Because contributing to OSS is a self-decided move, it does make sense that the success is more indicative of single-agent performance rather than external factors.
Yes!!! never underestimate the power of building transferrable skills.
Hmmmm... I don't know if I'd agree with this. Referencing the previous annotation, I think people tend to sleep on proper documentation and polish. While I don't think this'd be the case for "industry-standard" OSS (curl being a good example), I do think that (for an individual contributing to OSS with less authority, adoption, or audience) documentation is key.
If an interviewer or company isn't familiar with your work, they at least need to be able to see at-a-glance what the value of a project is. Even experienced engineers wouldn't give a shit about a random GitHub repository with no documentation, even if it contains big-brain ideas or world-changing software.
Follow-up needed — I'm interested to see if this has evolved at all, or at the very least to read & review.
Interesting - let's talk about some ethos!
My brain is screaming "VSA!". Parallelization is as important — if not more important — in planning software development as it is in software development itself.
oh, i hadn't thought of this — part of the reason I try to bring collaborators in on CGC work is because having even a small team does wonders in keeping momentum.
I'd liken it to the idea of variance in multiple distributions. Combining two normal distributions — in this case, representing motivation and velocity — ultimately lowers the variance of the distribution.
What?! They didn't even mention Perl's weird-ass "cycling leadership" that was mentioned at the top of the paper. I want to know more about that! It sounds whack as hell!
I wonder how this works now that Apache is no longer just "Apache," but also an amalgamation of products (e.g Spark, Arrow (or whatever that underlying Database structure thing is called, etc.)
I also wonder... how does this contribute to private use of the software? I know that the person who made Apache Spark now (IIRC) works as the CTO at Databricks, who benefits immensely from continued development on Spark. Are there instances of people in these positions potentially using this voting/veto power to further their own private interests at the cost of the broader community — and, if so, was trust undermined?
Huh - this is something I'd never thought about. Video games are really weird, insofar as some of them do roll credits at the end of the game, not unlike movies or television shows.
See - I wonder if there are good, broad solutions to run software repositories for things like pip, apt, npm, etc, since that would be a fantastic thing to set up at companies for people to install things across the company.
One shortfall may be undermining the ease-of-use of just using the default, public software repositories.
Oh shit - this should absolutely be followed up on.
finally! the free-rider problem!! This is the one I think about most when OSS contributions come up.
If you can use a piece of software and don't have to incur the cost of contribution, why contribute?
...I need to look into this more. What exactly does the consortium provide that de-limits the amount of commercial contributions to a project?
Some level of coordination and more authority, perhaps?
Ah, yes! K8s, React, Material, etc etc etc!
"Ex Nihilo" in this case meaning "Something for nothing." This is somewhat the flipped case of free-riding, where the owner of the OSS expects contributions from others.
I'd imagine this use case would, in effect, undermine the authority of the company releasing proprietary software as OSS.
However, the interesting thing - what if the company simply "transfers ownership" over to an OSS consortium? I believe I've seen this one happen before, but examples are eluding me.
Ah, yes, the Terraform to Terraform Cloud pipeline.
I had no idea Mozilla came from Netscape in this situation - and it's funny to see that Mozilla has worked out pretty damn well. Does Netscape still retain some ownership over the modern Mozilla organization?
It's so interesting to see this 2000 paper paint Mozilla as a failure. It's worth a follow-up to see how Mozilla pulled out of what this paper paints as a nose-dive, death-spiral of irrelevance.
This is interesting - IIRC Google has an "internal build" of K8s running, meaning that an inferior (Google-contribution-wise) version was the OSS version.
I'd say the same thing about Databricks/Apache/Delta Lake, since I know that was the topic of some passion at one point.
Collab.net now redirects here, which is quite a pivot. That said, I feel I have seen SourceXchange out there - although I may be confusing it for StackExchange. It's worth following up to see if there's some relation, there.
Ah, the curl-to-Postman pipeline.
Something I have noticed is that people in OSS get real heated when the possibility of financial sponsorship comes up. I personally believe that it's in the moral right to contribute financially to OSS — which is why I have contributions like that built into my budget — but I've seen people get real mad about that take.
Okay — while I do get where they're coming from, the fact alone that JSTOR was selling access to this paper for $40.00 when it was available elsewhere as a draft does make me giggle.
Tell me more about commercial interests polluting academic progress?
"Too early to tell" from a paper written in 2000 is a great signal to follow-up.
teehee — "recent"
This feels like something GitHub would have data on. Worth a follow-up
Considering OSS has continued to grow, my gut instinct is that there are economically-incentivized reasons for contributions and that further research into... the further research, done in the last 24 years will yield some interesting new insights.
I'm glad I started here - doing research on this chronologically will, I think, be a very interesting project.
I feel like I've been throwing out a lot of super speculative opinions on the economics of OSS lately - with a couple upcoming projects and opportunities, I want to make sure I understand some quantitative models for OSS contributions.