What is on Your Mind?

I am an undergraduate in Anthropology, currently writing my final year dissertation. The subject I have chosen in the Open Source project. I will be writing a detailed ethnography of hacker culture and am searching for research participants. Particularly, I am looking for Open Source user groups based in London in order to conduct live face-to-face interviews. Additionally however, anybody who would be interested in participating virtually is absolutely welcome. The focus of my work will be the way in which Open Source redefines the relationship between humans and technology. Additionally I am interested in examining the Open Source project in terms of the “Gift Economy”, an alternative vision of economic practice first studied by Marcel Mauss in the early 20th century. Anybody who would be interested can e-mail to find out more. Also if you know of an Open Source group based in London I would greatly appreciate any information. Thank you in advance.

This list of London-based LUGs (Linux User Groups) might be a good starting point.

Interesting, though I'm not sure gift-economy is a good analogy. Give away your sandwich and your sandwich is gone; give away your source-code and you still have it. Most hackers(in the old sense) wouldn't write a web-server just as a gift to the world, they'd write it because they want a webserver. Once they're done, they give it away and lose nothing but the intangibles they couldn't really have counted on anyway.

There's selfish gains in it too -- open your code and you're no longer the only person on the planet to hunt down and bother when something goes wrong with it. Spread the expertise, spread the word, and spread the blame...

I agree with Corona688.

Most people don't write open source as a "gift" and therefore the term "gift economy" is misleading.

As Corona mentioned, people write code for a purpose and they often "crowd source" the development to increase participation, development skills, requirements development, testing, etc. This generally results is better code with a wider user base.

There are other benefits as well, including "resume power" as many companies today prefer to hire people with one or more open source projects in their portfolio. I know of one company that will not hire any coders who don't have this background, it is mandatory.

Sorry, but if you (osanthropologis) are writing a thesis on open source around the theme of the "gift economy" then I would argue that you have developed a fundamental misunderstanding of open source, developers and open source communities.

Firstly, I would like to apologise to everyone who responded so quickly and with such interest. The broadband in my house has been down for a week and BT have been too lazy to fix it till now. In any case I'm back online, and really hope that you're still interested in continuing this discussion. Also pludi, thank you for that link.

Some very interesting comments. I think it's great that you bring up selfish gene Corona because that sort of a Darwinian model is right at the heart of the course I'm doing. I don't know if you've heard of Zahavi and Signaling Theory? Basically, the way I'm looking at it is that there exists a culture of exchange in Linux because the creators and troubleshooters invest their time and energy into this one big project. If we want to look at it in Darwinian terms, there should be a benefit or a perceived benefit which equals or exceeds that cost. The intensity with which one contributes to the community project infers a sort of cultural status and an expectation of reciprocity. So in that way it may be looked at as a gift economy, I think.

This applies equally well to "cloud sourcing", as you mentioned Neo. The fact that they acquire a greater degree of technical expertise, standing and job prospects perfectly fits with the kind of model I'm working with. Of course, it could well be the case that it's inappropriate, but only time will tell and if all else fails I can just write that I was wrong! Perhaps the term Gift Economy is a little misleading but that's down to the late Mr. Mauss I'm afraid.
Really looking forward to your responses!

It happens. Glad to see you back. Careful how you toss around those terms -- someone could lose an eye!

I used the word "selfish". I didn't mention Darwin or the "selfish gene". As far as I knew, there wasn't a whole lot of biological reproduction involved in open-source software, but now I wonder what I'm missing. The vast majority of a program's users probably aren't programmers, their ability to reciprocate is limited. But we don't care -- their use costs us absolutely nothing. Though they're occasionally surprised we aren't devoted to them, unlike what they'd expect of a commercial entity!

Maybe if I used a more concrete example... I use the Gentoo linux distribution. All I'm required to do is obey the license agreement. I can download a CD, install, and do what I want without one word expected from me, and if it has everything I need working perfectly, no word needed from me either.

If I have legitimate problems with it, I'm invited to file a proper bug report on bugs.gentoo.org, answer the dev's questions with further information, et cetera. I'm under no obligation to do so but it just makes sense -- it's in my best interests to let them help me.

Since I'm a programmer, sometimes I can solve bugs myself. I'm invited to file bug reports explaining my solutions, though I'm still not obligated, but it just makes sense -- by giving it to them, it spares me a lot of future effort, since they'll give it back to me in a convenient pre-packaged form. I won't have to fix it myself anymore, it'll just come that way.

Now throw together several users working on the same bug. Some can only contribute information, some can contribute expertise, and some have access to the Gentoo tree to get the fix applied for good, and it's all in their naked self-interest to get the problem fixed, so they work together. This is the open-source ideal, I think. It doesn't work equally well for all software problems but can work quite well when it does.

One recurring problem is features, i.e. someone wants a feature added, not a bug fixed. Unless you convince some programmer or other that it's a really great idea to add this feature, they'll be ignored or given alternatives. If someone has the expertise to write the modifications themselves they stand a better chance of getting it incorporated, but it's still not a sure thing, especially if it means a lot of work. There were serial-terminal enhancements available for PUTTY for years, but it took them years to incorporate it properly, the writer of the add-on kept his own independent PUTTY version available in the meantime.

Another problem is very disused features or programs. Unless a bug in them causes gaping security holes, developers might not care enough to fix it, and might resort to just removing it.

It's not just a mob of users, though. Someone had to create the project in the first place -- though as is often the case, he built it because he wanted it. Some people must also volunteer significant efforts to maintain this code and community infrastructure. Their motivations are a little harder to pin down, and frequently vary. Keeping the same core developers onboard in the long term is a perennial problem.