Und Medienwissenschaften Open Collaboration
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Kunsthochschule f¨urMedien K¨oln F¨achergruppe Kunst- und Medienwissenschaften Open collaboration practices in software culture and their impact on the networked society Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Dr. phil. im Fach Kunst- und Medienwissenschaft Vorgelegt von Luis Fernando Medina Cardona aus Bogot´a,Kolumbien Prof. Dr. Georg Trogemann Kunsthochschule f¨urMedien K¨oln Prof. Dr. Frieder Nake Universit¨atBremen Verteidigt am 14.01.2021 Some of the contents of this dissertation have already been published in other forms. The relevant publications are listed below. En c´odigoabierto (in Open Source). Arcadia Magazine \mutantes digitales" (Digital Mutants), 107, p. 43. Bogot´a,2014. Exploraciones iniciales sobre la colaboraci´on,el software libre y/o de c´odigo abierto y su impacto en la sociedad (Initial approaches to collaboration, free/open source software, and their impact on society). Memorias del Festival Internacional de la Imagen (Proceedings of the International Image Festival). Manizales, 2015. La colaboraci´onen la cultura del software: presentaci´ondel problema, resultados intermedios y exploraci´oninicial de un estudio de caso en la cultura \maker" (Collaboration in the software culture: presentation of the issue, mid results, and initial approach to the \maker culture" study case.). Memorias del Encuentro Nacional de Investigaci´onen Posgrados ENID (Proceedings of the National Conference of Postgraduate Research). Manizales, 2015. The Free/Open Source Software as a Hybrid Concept: Considerations from a Colombian Activist's Perspective. Media-N Journal of the New Media Caucus, \Mestizo Technology: art, design and technoscience in Latin America". Vol. 12, N. 1, p. 76-81. 2016. Exploraciones sobre la cultura del software libre o abierto como met´afora de la colaboraci´onen la sociedad en red (Exploring the free/open software culture as a metaphor of collaboration in the network society). Actio: Journal Of Technology in Design, Film Arts and Visual Communication (2), p. 114-125. 2018. Open collaboration practices in software culture and their impact on the networked society Abstract This PhD dissertation addresses the open and collaborative mode of pro- duction in software. Specifically, it examines how various practices in the software culture have evolved and their relevance in the construct of the net- work society. It begins with a philosophical discussion in which a modern philosophy of technology points to technology as a system of thought and software as a technical culture. Not unlike the open and collaborative mode of production, software is source of metaphors. Upon these foundations, it undertakes the evolution of open practices from a historical and structural position. The historical account follows the premise that open collabora- tive practices of software precede the well-known Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). It presents some examples, first, related to the history of software and then to computer networks to track the motives and transforma- tion of the open collaboration metaphor. The structural approach presents modern open collaboration in software as the result of a sociotechnical net- work composed of actants (node/artifacts), executed, in turn, by a collective made up of a human community and technical developments, in which tex- tual machines for coding and communication are highlighted. Finally, the conclusion posits the findings and three modes of agency in software (algo- rithmic, interactive, and distributive). It also and suggests hybridization as the means to overcomes some shortcomings of the software open metaphor rhetoric. Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Research context . .1 1.2 Research motives . .4 1.3 Hypothesis and Objectives . .7 1.4 Methodological approach . .9 1.5 Sources . 13 1.6 Literary review . 16 1.7 Document structure . 20 2 Software: from a tool to a culture 25 2.1 Introduction . 25 2.2 The problem of thought in technology . 26 2.3 Arriving at the turn: some steps towards modern critique on technology . 30 2.4 The Computer: a universal and flexible machine . 38 2.5 Software as Technology . 45 2.5.1 What is Software? . 46 2.5.2 Software: the quest for materiality . 50 2.6 Software as a Culture . 53 3 A modular history of collaboration in software 57 3.1 Introduction . 57 3.2 A collaboration prehistory? . 59 3.2.1 Before there was software . 59 3.2.2 A collaborative PACT for a language . 63 3.2.3 A SHAREing community . 69 3.3 Interactive dreams: A hacker's tale . 75 3.3.1 First iteration: the hacker culture . 78 3.3.2 Shared resources: the ITS . 83 3.3.3 The UNIX philosophy . 88 3.4 The crisis of software . 94 i CONTENTS 3.4.1 Software engineering: a problematic discipline . 96 3.4.2 The time of the shifting paradigms . 101 3.4.3 Second iteration: Free Software and self-awareness . 109 4 The open network paradigm 115 4.1 Introduction . 115 4.2 Node 1: networks foreseen . 119 4.3 Node 2: Arpanet and the development of the network paradigm127 4.4 Node 3: the multiplicities of Unix . 136 4.5 Node 4: USENET for the people . 142 4.6 Node 5: \Commiting" Open Source Software . 146 4.7 Node 6: Debugging the bazaar . 152 4.8 Establishing a connection: platform network society . 158 5 The nodes of collaborative software development 163 5.1 Introduction . 163 5.2 A general approach to collaboration . 166 5.3 The distributed code object . 170 5.4 Communication artifacts . 177 5.5 The distributed team: a complex community . 186 5.6 Abstract artifacts . 193 5.6.1 Licensing . 194 5.6.2 Methodologies: agile methodologies . 197 5.6.3 Design artifacts: patterns . 199 5.7 Summary: the benefits of an open structure . 202 6 Conclusions 205 6.1 Summary . 205 6.2 Critical discussions . 209 6.2.1 Recurring themes . 209 6.2.2 Views and findings . 212 6.2.3 Problematic aspects . 216 6.3 Future work: metaphors from the south . 218 ii 1| Introduction 1.1 Research context We are living in the age of software. This statement -which may have for- merly sounded bold- can now be made based on simple inspection of our everyday surroundings; the state of society, business operations, work, edu- cation, and leisure are examples that show us that it is so. Although this statement appears very familiar, it is only one among many other descriptors of similar significance, such as computer age, digital age, and network age. It may also bring to mind old cultural memes from science fiction and popular culture, such as space-age or atomic age. No matter what our perception of this statement is, one thing is clear, it is important enough to raise the interest of journalists, scholars, and creators, as well as of the community at large. It is relevant and powerful enough to be a metaphor for one of the most noticeable features of a particular period of human civilization. However, it is my belief that software is a precise descriptor of the current state of our society. There are other related terms like computer, which is now strongly connected to a commodity, a trend and no longer at the core of Business, as the shift from hardware to software in Industry has shown [Campbell- Kelly, 2004]. Digital, on the other hand, despite its popularity to describe binary electronic technologies, is a term that has been depleted of meaning by marketing, let alone the inaccuracy which it embodies [Cramer, 2014]1. It would be fair to say that network is a fine descriptor, given the rise of the information exchange-based network society; in other words, computer net- works. Although there is some truth in this affirmation, it could be argued that software is the central gear that moves the networks' infrastructure and, at the same time, empowers its connecting interfaces2. The importance of 1As it is noted in the reference; digital refers merely to a discrete numerical represen- tation of phenomena, where electronic binary codification is just one case among several possibilities. 2The expression \networked software", proposed by Berry [Berry, 2011b, 2], takes this symbiotic relationship into account. 1 1.1. Research context software should be clear after this short discussion.Although there may be several approaches, the assessment of modern society shall meet somewhere with the knowledge of software as a complex whole. Indeed, at some stage, most people will engage in activities related to the input, processing, or results of a software-controlled task. In some instances, these activities are deliberate, and the person is completely aware of the soft- ware application, its interfaces, and how to enter the commands to undertake some activity (most of the time, the user can recognize the regular paths of software interaction despite not knowing what happens inside,). However, there is also software that runs in a seemingly invisible way, as in traffic lights or heating systems, unnoticed by the common person. Even in the most extreme scenarios, where people are computer illiterate or detached from technologically driven modern life, the chances are very high that their lives are affected by software-related tasks, with their data residing in some obscure database or as subjects of a governmental policy based on a software model. Simply put, if a person today is not interacting somehow with soft- ware, or is not indirectly affected by it, the possibility that this person lives entirely outside the modern global society is very high [Kitchin and Dodge, 2011]. As a result, software as a medium, which in turn can simulate sev- eral other media [Manovich, 2013], has become a strong academic point of interest that demands transdisciplinary scholarly approaches. Nevertheless, it remains a challenging subject to approach, given its highly technical na- ture and the tendency to focus only on its impacts, leaving its inner logics undiscovered.