Rethinking free, libre and open source software

This special issue includes seven articles that make significant contribution to the literature pertaining to knowledge and public policy around Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Focusing on questions in two themes (i) motivation and organization and (ii) public policy, the articles in this volume develop new analytic models and report on new empirical findings, as an important step in bridging the wide gap that exists in public policy literature around FLOSS. Warning against rhetorical pitfalls that have been prevalent in FLOSS research, this introduction starts with a short history of FLOSS development, continues with a brief thematic literature review and review of the misconceptions surrounding FLOSS, and concludes with a first introduction of the articles that follow. He is part of the Dutch Institute of Government (NIG), the research school for public administration and political science. His research focuses on the organization of open source communities. He received two grants from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for research related to open source communities. The first grant was to study the interplay between intellectual property rights and open source communities. The results are published in Governing the Virtual Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He has written numerous articles on open source, which have appeared in journals like Electronic Markets; Knowledge, Technology and Policy; and the International Journal of IT Standards & Standardisation Research. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of York (UK) in 2004. Her Ph.D. research investigated the heterogeneity and contingency in the Free, Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) social worlds, which is based on a constellation of hacking practices, from the sociological perspective. Her principal research interests center on FLOSS studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), virtual communities and knowledge-sharing. Shay is also a fellow at The Information Society Project at the Yale Law School. Shay holds a B.Sc. in computer science and a B.A. in philosophy, magna cum laude, from Tel-Aviv University, and an M.A. from New York University where his interdisciplinary research thesis focused on the political economy of free and open source software and file sharing networks. Shay is an entrepreneur that co-founded two software start-up companies, and was involved for several years in cutting edge software research, combining open source and proprietary software.     

Hierarchy and centralization in free and open source software team communications

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams provide an interesting and convenient setting for studying distributed work. We begin by answering perhaps the most basic question: what is the social structure of these teams? We conducted social network analyses of bug-fixing interactions from three repositories: Sourceforge, GNU Savannah and Apache Bugzilla. We find that some OSS teams are highly centralized, but contrary to expectation, others are not. Projects are mostly quite hierarchical on four measures of hierarchy, consistent with past research but contrary to the naive image of these projects. Furthermore, we find that the level of centralization is negatively correlated with project size, suggesting that larger projects become more modular, or possibly that becoming more modular is a key to growth. The paper makes a further methodological contribution by identifying appropriate analysis approaches for interaction data. We conclude by sketching directions for future research.     

Metronome LKM: An open source virtual keyboard driver to measure experiment software latencies

Experiment software is often used to measure reaction times gathered with keyboards or other input devices. In previous studies, the accuracy and precision of time stamps has been assessed through several means: (a) generating accurate square wave signals from an external device connected to the parallel port of the computer running the experiment software, (b) triggering the typematic repeat feature of some keyboards to get an evenly separated series of keypress events, or (c) using a solenoid handled by a microcontroller to press the input device (keyboard, mouse button, touch screen) that will be used in the experimental setup. Despite the advantages of these approaches in some contexts, none of them can isolate the measurement error caused by the experiment software itself. Metronome LKM provides a virtual keyboard to assess an experiment’s software. Using this open source driver, researchers can generate keypress events using high-resolution timers and compare the time stamps collected by the experiment software with those gathered by Metronome LKM (with nanosecond resolution). Our software is highly configurable (in terms of keys pressed, intervals, SysRq activation) and runs on 2.6–4.8 Linux kernels.     

Open source software and software patents: A constitutional perspective

Imagine if each square of pavement on the sidewalk had an owner, and pedestrians required a license to step on it. Imagine the negotiations necessary to walk an entire block under this system. That is what writing a program will be like if software patents continue. The sparks of creativity and individualism that have driven the computer revolution will be snuffed out. Imagine if each square of pavement on the sidewalk had an owner, and pedestrians required a license to step on it. Imagine the negotiations necessary to walk an entire block under this system. That is what writing a program will be like if software patents continue. The sparks of creativity and individualism that have driven the computer revolution will be snuffed out.—Richard Stallman and Simson Garfinkel (1992) This article highlights the vulnerability of the open source software movement to patent infringement lawsuits. With the number of patents on software algorithms predicted to exceed 100,000 this year, it is now virtually impossible to write any computer program, however trivial, that does not violate one or more patents. This paper argues that this situation is not only ludicrous, but it is contrary to any reasonable reading of the Constitution’s intentions with respect to the protection of intellectual property. In addition, the patentability of software algorithms stems from the U.S. Supreme Court’s failure to grasp one of the most fundamental concepts of computer science. From this error stems a long, dysfunctional chain of legal reasoning and patent policies, the effect of which has been to transform the mental reasoning processes, abstract knowledge, and scientific truths of computing into patentable subject matter. The result poses a potentially catastrophic threat not only to the open source software movement and the emerging industry of electronic commerce, but more fundamentally, to the very existence of the sciences of computing, without which further U.S. technological leadership will be impossible to sustain. An anthropologist, Dr. Pfaffenberger has authored dozens of how-to and reference books on computers and the Internet. He won the Albert Payson Usher Prize from the Society for the History of Technology and the Best Book of the Year Award from the American Society for Information Science.     

The puzzles of ground

Philosophical Studies - I outline and provide a solution to some paradoxes of ground.     

The uniqueness of software errors and their impact on global policy

The types of errors that emerge in the development and maintenance of software are essentially different from the types of errors that emerge in the development and maintenance of engineered hardware products. There is a set of standard responses to actual and potential hardware errors, including: engineering ethics codes, engineering practices, corporate policies and laws. The essential characteristics of software errors require new ethical, policy, and legal approaches to the development of software in the global arena. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Engineering Foundation Conference on “Ethics for Science and Engineering Based International Industries” Durham, NC, USA. September 1997.     

The spacing effect: Additions to the theoretical and empirical puzzles

Four studies examined the MP-DP effect (spacing effect) in four quite different situations: recognition of letters, verbal discrimination, short free recall lists, and recall of MP items presented twice, with an intervening interval inserted to produce forgetting. MP-DP differences were found in all studies. Of particular interest were three interactions. Subjects with a low criterion of responding in the letter study lost the MP-DP effect over a 30-sec delay, and subjects with a high criterion did not. A clear MP-DP effect, but no lag effect, was found only with unmixed verbal discrimination lists. In free recall, a sharp lag effect was shown for words presented three times but not for words presented twice. A forgetting interval inserted between the two occurrences of an MP item did not appreciably aid its recall. The results were found to pose severe problems for current theoretical ideas about the spacing effect.     

Slouching toward policy: lazy bioethics and the perils of science fiction

Too much contemporary bioethical discourse is weak on science, lazily citing and adopting science fiction scenarios rather than science facts in the framing of analyses and policies. We challenge bioethicists to take more seriously the role of providing informed insight into and oversight over contemporary science and its implications and applications. Bioethicists must work harder to understand the fast-changing truths and limits of basic science, and they must incorporate only appropriate and authentic science into their discourse, just as they did in the past when addressing the quandaries of clinical medicine. The field of bioethics is not so old and entrenched that its future is assured. Bioethicists must make themselves useful to society in order to deserve and retain the public's trust. They can best do this by ensuring that decision making and public policy are grounded in facts, not fictions and fantasies.     

The multiple meanings of neutrality

Throughout the evolution of psychoanalysis, its theories and methods have been deeply influenced by ideas about psychoanalytic neutrality. However, considerable dissension has surrounded the concept of neutrality. This paper defines five distinct categories of neutrality the author considers relevant to all theoretical perspectives on psychoanalysis: behavioral, attitudinal, interpersonal, interactional, and essential.     

Minority influence: the role of ambivalence toward the source

According to literature on social influence, a minority source may indirectly influence group members by fostering ambivalent reactions. Two studies were carried out in order to provide empirical support for this theoretical assumption. In Study 1 participants (n = 133), were exposed to a counter‐attitudinal minority message and ambivalence was manipulated by facilitating the accessibility of either ambivalent (positive and negative) or univalent (positive or negative) thoughts toward the source. We predicted and found more indirect influence in ambivalent condition than in univalent conditions. No effect of ambivalence on direct influence was found. In Study 2 (n = 127), ambivalence was measured and two possible antecedents of ambivalence, consistency of the minority and personal relevance of the topic for participants, were taken into account. Findings suggest that ambivalence mediates the effects of the two factors on indirect influence. In sum, these studies provide evidence of the importance of ambivalence in minority influence context, an early assumption that was still lacking in strong empirical support. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Response competition: A major source of interference in a tactile identification task

Two experiments investigated the ability of subjects to identify a moving, tactile stimulus. In both experiments, the subjects were presented with a target to their left index fingerpad and a nontarget (also moving) to their left middle fingerpad. Subjects were instructed to attend only to the target location and to respond “1” if the stimulus moved either to the left or up the finger, and to respond “2” if the stimulus moved either right or down the finger. The results showed that accuracy was better and reaction times were faster when the target and nontarget moved in the same direction than when they moved in different directions. When the target and nontarget moved in different directions, accuracy was significantly better and reaction times were significantly faster when the two stimuli had the same assigned response than when they had different responses. The results provide support for the conclusion that movement information is processed across adjacent fingers to the level of incipient response activation, even when subjects attempt to focus their attention on one location on the skin.     

Hand movements deviate toward distracters in the absence of response competition

In a series of experiments, participants reached to targets in the presence of visual distracters that were either adjacent to the target or located along the reach path. The reaching movements were affected by the presence of the distracters, with the movement paths deviating toward the distracters. Those deviations were observed under two different conditions: (a) one in which the distracter could potentially have been a movement target; and (b) another in which the distracter never was a possible target. Because the movement was affected by the distracter in both situations, the results suggested that response competition is not necessary for distracter-induced reach-path deviations. Instead, the authors propose that attention to a distracter is sufficient to affect the to-target movement. The movement deviations may reveal an effective mechanism for coping with stimulus-rich environments.     

A world survey of secular-religious competition: state religious policy from 1990 to 2014

ABSTRACT

This study argues that the competition between secular and religious actors significantly influences State religion policy (SRP) (the secular-religious competition perspective). I examine this proposition using the Religion and State Round 3 (RAS3) dataset which measures 117 types of SRP between 1990 and 2014 in 183 countries and territories. The results show that while SRP is overall becoming more common, only 3.7% of countries made no changes in their SRP and 69.5% of countries both (a) added or intensified at least one SRP and (b) dropped or decreased the intensity of at least one SRP. This finding remains consistent when looking at each of the 117 types of SRP independently, as well as when controlling for the country’s majority religion and world region. These results are consistent with the secular-religious competition perspective.