The Weight of the Intangible

Tomáš Karger The Weight of the Intangible Knowledge Networks in Free and Open Source Software Development Reviewed by: doc. Mgr. Dopita Miroslav, Ph.D., Dr hab. Piotr Chomczyński Published by Palacký University Olomouc, Faculty of Arts Edition SocioPolis, Vol. 1 Edition managed by: Doc. PhDr. Tomáš Lebeda, Ph.D. Making and publishing of this book was enabled by financial support granted in 2016 by Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, CZE, under the Institutional Development Plan to Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Olomouc. / Zpracování a vydání publikace bylo umožněno díky finanční podpoře, udělené roku 2016 Ministerstvem školství, mládeže a tělovýchovy ČR v rámci Institucionálního rozvojového plánu, Filozofické fakultě Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND. See the license conditions at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Unauthorized use of this work amounts to copyright infringement and may result in civil, administrative or criminal liability. 1st edition © Tomáš Karger, 2016 © Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2016 ISBN 978-80-87895-67-2 OBSAH Contents List of Abbreviations 4 Preface 5 Introduction 7 1 From UNIX to Technological Utopia 17 1.1 Free and Open Source Software 17 1.2 Utopian Virtualism 31 2 Software and Knowledge 39 2.1 Tools and Design Artifacts in Software Development 39 2.2 The Role of Knowledge in Software Development 43 3 Network Shaped Knowledge Distribution 49 3.1 Cognitive Networks 49 3.2 Actor-Networks 52 4 Practices of a FOSS project 61 4.1 Code allocation 61 4.2 Knowledge Channeling 67 4.3 Debugging 81 4.4 Revision Tracking 88 5 Mediation and Resources Inside a FOSS Project 99 5.1 Meanings of Mediation 99 5.1.1 Composition 99 5.1.2 Translation and Delegation 109 5.1.3 Black-boxing 123 5.2 Resources Driving Development 128 5.2.1 Volunteer Effort 128 5.2.2 Formal Organizations 135 6 Conclusion 145 References 156 Index 167 Summary 169 CONTENTS 3 OBSAH List of Abbreviations API (Application Programming Interface) BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) CLA (Contributor License Agreement) FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) FSF (Free Software Foundation) GDB (GNU Project Debugger) GES (Gstreamer Editing Services) GNU (GNU is not UNIX) GPL (General Public License) GTK (GIMP Toolkit) GUADEC (Gnome User and Developer Conference) HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) IP (Internet Protocol) IRC (Internet Relay Chat) KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) LGPL (Lesser General Public License) LOC (Line of Code) OSI (Open Source Initiative) POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface) QEMU (Quick Emulator) LIST OF Abbreviations 4 OBSAH Preface This book is a reworked and refined version of my dissertation thesis, which I was able to successfully defend in the fall of 2015. The text con- cludes with essentially the same points, although they are now better articulated thanks to the suggestions of two reviewers. The text is also structured differently to provide better orientation for the reader. In ad- dition, many small modifications were made to the text as a result of re- reading and re-considering some of its parts. The original topic of my dissertation research was quite a different one. It should have been a theoretical work about the concept of self- organization (or emergence, spontaneous order) and its use in the social sciences. Having a technological background in my education, I was fascinated by the language of Cybernetics and Systems Theory (Niklas Luhmann’s theory in particular) and by the images of spontaneously emerging order. The reader can still trace these influences in several footnotes appearing throughout the work. It was only during the first year of my Ph.D. studies that I realized that I could put my education to use in a different way. I could do participant observation in a field where not many sociologists or anthropologists would feel at home. This went hand in hand with the fact that I found two fields to be repeatedly listed as empirical examples of self-organization: science and free and open source software development. The former has been researched for quite some time now with a substantial body of literature on record. But the latter has only about a decade and a half on its record with a significantly smaller body of literature. This was an area where I could make a good contribution. Moreover, since high school (where I studied electrotech- nical engineering), I have been a user interested in the latest develop- ments in free and open source software, which provided me with a rough picture of the field’s most basic dividing lines. All of this led to my decision to officially change the topic of my dissertation, leaving me with a lot to catch up on but also with the advan- tage of my prior everyday knowledge, which of course had to undergo a thorough reflection. Eventually, my findings led me to a rather critical position regarding the images associated with self-organization as I un- covered their limited relevance and the utopic valence they carry. There is some irony in the fact that one of the points of this work is to show Preface 5 OBSAH the limitations of the images which initially fascinated me and drew me to the topic. But I take this as a sign that I did not succumb to my initial preconceptions. How much this work will transform knowledge in the relevant fields of study remains to be seen. However, a different transfor- mation has already taken place, that of its author. I would like to thank my colleagues and mentors for inspiration, advice and guidance. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to Miroslav Dopita, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Piotr Chomczyńksi, Jan Kalenda, Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Dušan Lužný, Albert Müller, Libora Oates-Indruchová and Gerlinda Šmausová. I am also grateful to my friends and members of my family for their support and patience. Preface 6 OBSAH Introduction For some, software development is an activity obscure enough that it should nicely connect to the anthropological tradition of studying exotic cultures shrouded in mystery. Others may find it as boring as reading through telephone books – a different kind of information infrastruc- ture. However, reading and writing source code (which is the primary activity behind software development) has been recently pronounced to be a new form of literacy by many influential individuals.1 The atmosphere induced by this assumption has spread considerably. Some software developers criticize it2 while many officials endorse it – to name the most prominent example, Barack Obama became the first US president to write a line of source code.3 Without trying to position myself in the discussion about the legitimacy of the literacy status of programming, I want to point out that the spread and significance of activities associated with software development have risen considerably from the times when computers could be afforded by few and the knowledge necessary to operate them was held by even fewer, to the times when GitHub, a web service designed to share source code, is among the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet.4 This development went hand-in-hand with another process, a shift in which free and open source software (FOSS), as a movement or as a software development methodology, established itself against the traditional proprietary model. It suffices to reiterate the glaring difference between 1 See the Code.org initiative which revolves precisely around this assumption and is supported by the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. 2 Coding is not the new literacy. Blog post of a well-known software developer relayed by Slashdot, a popular user curated news site. Published: 2015-01-26. Accessed: 2015-04- 30. Available at: http://www.chris-granger.com/2015/01/26/coding-is-not-the-new- literacy/. 3 President Obama Is the First President to Write a Line of Code. Article published by The White House Blog. Published: 2014-12-10. Accessed: 2015-04-22. Available at: https:// www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/12/10/president-obama-first-president-write-line- code. 4 How Github Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else. An article in the Wired magazine. Published: 2015-03-12. Accessed: 2015-04-21. Available at: http://www.wired. com/2015/03/github-conquered-google-microsoft-everyone-else/. INTRODUCTION 7 OBSAH the 1970s and the present day, pointing at the scale of involvement of sig- nificant players of the technological industry in open source software.5 However, there is a more illustrative way of showing the gradual estab- lishment of free and open source software. In 2001, the Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously stated that “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to every- thing it touches.”6 For a long time, Microsoft was seen as the arch enemy of free and open source software. This relationship occasionally culmi- nated in statements like Ballmer’s or, from the other side of the barri- cade, pokes by Linus Torvalds, the originator of the Linux kernel: “Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely uninten- tional side effect.”7 Such was the atmosphere in 2003. One decade later, in October 2014, a Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that “Microsoft loves Linux.”8 In February 2015, Microsoft releases its important .NET frame- work on GitHub under an open source license.9 And in April 2015, Mark Russinovich, one of Microsoft’s top engineers publicly states that open sourcing Windows, the company’s core product, is “definitely possible.”10 These statements mark a shift during which the open source ap- proach to software development rose from a challenger to an established position.

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