Open-source projects also serve as venues for recruiting, looking at the volunteers for potential employees. Companies that get involved in sponsoring a project can find out who are the good people here in the community who have the natural talent or the track record or experience, which they would be unlikely to find through traditional recruiting means. These people might be in geographic locations that are inconvenient, but they are really capable and have deep expertise, and let's see if there is a new kind of employment relationship that might be able to engage them to make the voluntary contributions and engage in work for pay. And those people tend to get higher-than-average pay. People who are typically in the core contributors -- people near the centre of the project -- they're the ones who have this higher level of participation; their work products are publicly available for others to individually evaluate, and companies find that that's an extremely important resource.
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.
So what, exactly, is happening to spur that faster growth you're seeing in open source? What's an example?
Let's say you're a master of UI (user interface) technology, so you hook up to another project and can import or reuse the code and the expertise that's been acquired so far. If our projects form that symbiosis, they can merge with a third, so this starts to account for why you see that substantial growth. This is a manifestation of software reuse that is different than what's being advocated by the software engineering community, which says everything's in a library that everyone dips in to in order to take what they need, and then it goes away. Here you say, "I create something you want, so I make my work in both contexts and together we have new context, and as we build this social network, what we're doing is bringing software expertise and source code with us so that in comparatively short amounts of time we can have large amounts of people create a large system without the coordination or management of a central corporate authority or project manager."
What else are you looking at in your research?
One thing is the role of free and open-source public licences -- things like the GPL. We're not going to address legal issues, but what the licences do in practice is reinforce and institutionalise a set of beliefs, values and norms for how free or open-source software should be developed. It's a statement of affiliation, of how to build software, of the reasons why to build software. Here open-source licences not only serve community property rights but also act as a way of declaring affiliation with this broader social movement. Open-source is becoming a global social movement, so it can grow beyond the boundaries of software development.
Where are you seeing open-source principles adopted beyond software development?
There's an open-source community in architecture, working in developed countries, of people who will contribute their designs in developing or emerging countries, where hiring an architect to do something is prohibitively expensive. There's open-source education --
Like at MIT.
That's at the college level, but also in grade schools and high schools globally. People in the United States and Europe are contributing content for math and science classes for their own countries and developing countries, where purchasing textbooks is prohibitively expensive. In the visual-arts community, there's a movement to explore what it means to do works of art for sharing, or building upon works of art of other people. People are breaking away from the tradition of the individual artist, saying there's another way to build upon the work of others.
And in the area of government, a number of European and Third World countries are looking to adopt open-source systems for reasons of perceived cost or low cost, but at the same time they bring in the open-source systems, they also embrace the ideology of openness, which in turn may be a revitalisation of what it means to be an open, democratic nation or government. So the process becomes open source so that citizens can better understand how their governments work and how a corporate provider of information technology is serving its own interest in selling systems to its government or if it's helping the people.
