FOSS Notes

STAGE ONE

• Motivations
  • We have these three ideas of the movement. Gift econoimcs. Market economics. A cultural movement. Let's get Mako talking on this.

• Proposition: writing free software and working for a proprietary software company is analogous to doing academic research and working R&D for a corporation.

• Proposition: All of the grand ideas of gift economics really just collapse into market economics. Lerner. (In the beginning, this was *the* explanation. Has it been subsumed by a cultural analysis of the movement?)

• Proposition: Despite Moglen's insistence, Kelty implies that FOSS took off only because Eric S. Raymond turned FOSS into a non-ideological movement.

• Consider these issues in the FOSS world

• • Stallman's ideology v. Raymond's practical approach
    • Do Stallman and Moglen represent a generational difference in views of FOSS?
  • Inclusive movement v. Elitist scene

STAGE TWO

• What are the characteristics of a (1) successful FOSS project, (2) successful FOSS process?
• CATB: Comparing the "bazaar" (FOSS) model to the "cathedral" (proprietary) model, the main advantage of FOSS is the maxim, "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"

• Isn't it bizarre that a movement that, in some sense, attempts to destroy IP in software, is so heavily dependent on IP law? It seems pretty interested in the law -- can we speculate as to why this is so?
  • Kelty says, "free software hacks IP law". Ch. 6.

STAGE THREE

• Regarding open source governance, what are the characteristics we've learned about projects and processes that make open source development successsful?

• Mako on the GPL v3 development process

• If we wanted to create an open source law project, how would it work? Can we learn anything from Wikipedia on this?

• Regarding CATB, open source law complicates matters because law inloves questions of policy choice?

• Kelty says that unlike other "movements", FOSS is held together and progresses by the practices not the ideologies. How does this translate to open source law?

• Do either of these statements translate to open source law?
  • ESR: Open source is an evolutionary necessary outcome of the natuarl tendancy of human societies toward economies of abundance.
  • Stallman: Open source is a defense of the fundamental freedoms of creativity and speech.
    • law as a "speech act" ?
  • Dulles: Free software is about self-determination.

• Maybe open source law is destined to fail as a concept because law is too entrenched in society as outside the reaches of laymen, who don't believe they have any place to dictate its maxims.

O'Mahony Notes

author claims that Linux and Wikipedia, as opposed to Debian, derive much of their power from having a single effective leader that hasn't been replaced

bureacratic basis of authority reinforcing community's meritocratic norms

the meritocracy aspects of Debian also implicate the ability to build and organize as a meritable skill that gets one a position in the DPL.

democratic mechanisms that allow the system to adapt to changing intepretations of leadership

collective forms of production tend to share a common means

"little has been done to understand how these projects are governed" XXX THE BURNING CENTRAL QUESTION!

Three distinctions of "production communities"

1. no common employer or workplace
2. individual contributions must end up in a common pool
3. the communities "own" their product

Organizations without consensual basis don't have authority Organizations with direct governance don't scale. Representative democracy?

Governance systems must be meritocratic in order to attract highly qualified contributions. does this mean that open source law will work if the best "contributors" are rewarded with spots in the Senate?

foss governance has a bureaucracy that is more enabling than coercive. assumption that we all have the same goals.

four phases of governance in foss (debian)

1. de facto governance
2. designing governance
   • designing Constitution over the course of a full year on a mailing list. arguably a highly substantive process that would have taken years otherwise to parse out all of the relevant contributions and opinions.
3. implementing governance
4. stabalizing governance

notable features of the debian constitution (debian has withstood 13 leadership changes in 9 years)

• DPL must make decisions which are consistence with the consensus of the opinnions of the developers"
• developer "technical discussions are what make Debian great"
• DPL doesn't have independent authority, is just a developer on a soap-box

Debian Constitution structure assures that decisions are made only with broad consensus

dulles: doesn't the idea of a meritocracy imply a way to measure the value of contributions to sort out the good from the bad? it's easy to analyze the big-O efficiency of an algorithm. hard to analyze the competing implementations of a government's policy.

in some sense the risk is lower for a national government than for a Debian government. If the Debian governance project fails, Debian may disappear. If a national government fails, many competing militias, the military, and other powerful individuals may take over. The State itself does not "disappear".