Eräitä huomioita

This blog has been silent for a year now. One reason for this is that I have started a second degree, this time in law (University of Turku). Studying takes a lot of my time.

However, I’m still working for the OSSI project (part-time). We study company participation in free/open source software companies. You can find our research reports on the site. Also worth mentioning is a chapter on Richard Stallman’s philosophy in the Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives that I wrote with Tere. I’m also a co-author in The Protestant ethic strikes back: Open source developers and the ethic of capitalism that appered in First Monday. We are also participating in the OSS2007 in Limerick, Ireland in June.

From now on, I might be writing less on free software and more and other topics, probably in Finnish. Those only interested in FS can follow that topic or subscribe to the corresponding feed.

For a software company, making a product free/open source software (FOSS) or participating in such a project is sometimes a wise business decision. However, for the effort to be succesful, the company must know how FOSS communities work and how they interact with companies. The OSSI project is an attempt to increase our understanding on the topic.

Karl Fogel has written a good practical guidebook from such a point of view. The book is
Producing Open Source Software. How to Run a Successful Free Software Project (O’Reilly 2005). The book is also available online under a Creative Commons license.

Fogel starts by describing how to start a new project effectively. Like Jamie Zawinski said, a FOSS license is not a magic pixie dust that will bring lots of developers to your project. For this to happen, the project must be attractive, it must be easy to start with and it must be promising. The developers don’t want project documentation, they want code. They don’t want management structure, they want screenshots. They want a free and open license. Unless the basic technical infrastructure is there, it is hard to have the project going.

After the infrastructure, he moves on to discuss project structures. The project can be a (benevolent) dictatorship, a skills-based meritocracy or some issues are decided by a vote. Because the structure is often informal, whether a company may affect the outcome of the project depends on the actual company developers working on the software. If the developers are skilled and receive respect from other community members, they will have a say on the future direction of the software.

Chapter five on money is particularily interesting. Fogel describes different ways of company participation and discusses the benefits and problems of paid developers in a volunteer community.

Other chapters give advice on communications, release management and how to attract and treat volunteers. Volunteers, after all, are essential. If the volunteers go, the project will, if not die, at least change dramatically. Chapter nine is on licenses and copyright ownership and assignment.

I think is the best practical guidebook to FOSS I’ve seen so far. I recommend you to take a look.

The Ministry of Trade and Industry of Finland has switched to Mozilla Firefox as the browser of choice. The decision is an outcome of an internal project to enhance security of the operating environment at the Ministry. Internet Explorer can still be used for sites that have been proven secure or that require browser specific features.

I think this means about 300 people, but it seems the Finnish government is slowly moving to free solutions.

The announcement in Finnish

Mikko Välimäki has published his PhD disseration on open source licensing on the web. The book is called The Rise of Open Source Licensing. A Challenge to the Use of Intellectual Property in the Software Industry. The book is on different licensing models but also has bits on history of the movement and history of copyright and patents. It looks very interesting. I recommend you to take a look.

I’ve noticed a lot of buzz about open source among e-learning folks, but I thought it’s just about the low cost, a point of view I don’t find theoretically interesting at all. Then I heard Graham Attwell speak at ITK 2005. Teemu Arina made some notes about Attwell’s presentation:

According to Graham, Open Source is a good thing for education. Open Source software is able to reflect on particular pedagogical approaches. Previously on the LMS [Learning Management System] dominated market, management was the paradigm instead of learning. In that sense, educational software improved in the way how it operated and not in conceptual terms. The reason for shift towards more pedagogic thinking is mainly because of Open Source.

Although Teemu writes about a different session than the one I attended, the point is still the same: that free/open software enables users to produce software that is based on more flexible ideas of pedagogy and different values. It allows us to create different pedagogies, experiment and fool around. It seems to me that different technologies embed different social values, and you can see this in the field of educational software: whether it’s the “Intellectual property”-driven idea of a learning product or learning as participation in a knowledge creation community - be it in an intranet, www, wiki, or something else - let’s leave the technical solution open for the learners and educators.