Free Software and Communism

Sac State has a program through MSDN that provides their current OS for free to the students. UC Davis does not (or at least I haven't found it yet if they do). Curious. But the bigger issue is my changing thoughts about what I expect to spend for software.

In the 30 years I have had an association with Microsoft I have probably spent in excess of $10,000 buying their products. Despite this continued relationship Microsoft doesn't know I exist and provides some of the worst customer service I have ever experienced. I have had a few times where it was a bug in their product I wanted to talk about and have been given the run-around or been asked to fork over $100 to talk to someone. Microsoft has historically charged too much for an inferior product for far too long. They seem to relate to the consumer market the way a farmer relates to a field crop.

While I myself am not the sort inclined to tinker with an OS, many people I have known are. The Linux and open source movement have been incredibly empowering for those of us who have the capability and inclination to tinker. First it is free. That of course is a huge advantage seeing that Microsoft has the audacity to float an undiscounted price for Windows 7 that is over $500. If I hadn't been getting their products for free from school I would have abandoned them long ago. There is a certain hubris that the people they might want to recruit to write operating systems would be asked to spend a significant amount of money in their education using scarce resources to buy their products. It would be in their interest to ensure that every CS major receives a generous support from them if for no other reason than good PR. So at some level good CS students must find it galling that they are asked to pay a high price for an inferior product. Is it any wonder that it is often students are the most creative in finding ways to avoid paying for their products?

Since it is CS students and the professionals they become use software as their tools of the trade daily over their careers, it makes perfect sense that they will be the most critical consumers of these tools. Any worker who uses a tool daily will choose and maintain her tools with great care. When the market provides only a mediocre tool, there is an opportunity for some worker to turn their attention to the tool. Of course many workers do not have the skills to tinker with their tools. A machine shop worker probably does not have the technology at hand to tinker with a high-precision lathe. But a software engineer with the source code for a major piece of system's software does. While it is only a minority of these engineers who are inclined to tinker, it is enough to create an alternative in the tool market. We have certainly seen that exhibited in the market for open source software and the active support it gets.

In some idealized libertarian universe, these talented tinkerers could have formed an alternative to Microsoft and made some money from their collective efforts. But creating and managing a business is not a trivial affair and certainly not what motivates talented software engineers. Engineers in general are great admirers of functionality and not of management. Their are significant intrinsic rewards to the creation of a good product but few in the marketing and sales of that product to them. Yes, there are some rare individuals who excel at both. But their scarcity relative to the number of highly talented engineers is precisely my point. The open source model was appealing to them because it gave them control over their means of production and empowered them to do things for their clients that are impossible in a closed  model.

Some have tried to cast these engineers as proto-communists contributing to a common good. (from each according to his ability, to each according to their need). But if that attitude exists in the open source community, I have not yet seen it baldly stated. Rather than being driven by some ideological position, the market seems to be moving along a highly pragmatic path of least resistance. The closed software market has not met their needs to provide high-quality, responsive solution to the clients using their tools. Instead of forming highly responsive relationships with these integrators, the companies seem to have put their needs behind the company's. Doesn't it make sense that someone responsible for providing the company with a high-quality web server would be more inclined to support Apache than IIS? It is in their self-interest to choose this simply because they have greater control over the resolution of any problem or enhancement than they would over a close product at the leading edge of its deployment. The fact that other people gain access to a high quality product as a consequence is irrelevant to them and takes nothing from them. In fact, the widespread adoption of Apache enhances their marketability since employers who desire to avoid IIS, for whatever reason, will seek them for employment.

No, I am not finding any incipient communism in the growing open source movement but instead a marketplace that is responding to the maxim 'information wants to be free" plus an enlightened self-interest among the most talented software engineers of our day. They seem to be having a blast. Now if we can only figure out where the margins of this new market lie.

A First Look at Commit Data for an Open Source Software Project

I got a little something to sink my teeth into. I am looking at commit data for some open source projects. This is mostly an exercise in regaining my sql chops and learning R. Here is my first plot:

The plot has the alias of the submitter along the X and the timestamp along the Y. What you can see for this one project is that there are two heavily dedicated submitters who both started working on the project about the same time, one who is more sporadic and started shortly before the two of them and two who appear to have started the project but only periodically commit although their activity is relatively consistent over the entire length of the project. What is somewhat surprising is how many there are who have almost no commit activity (there is some doubt regarding whether this alias is the submitter or committer although it is supposed to be the commit id). It seems odd that someone would have gained committer status and then stopped commiting. Will I see this pattern in other projects? Who are these heavy committers and how do they differ in role from the people who appear to have started the project?