[Themaintainers] Open Source Software: What makes maintenance something people do ?

Thu Aug 27 09:54:54 EDT 2020

Bravo!

James Howison

Associate Professor
School of Information
University of Texas at Austin
http://james.howison.name

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 5:09 AM Atul Pokharel <atulpokh at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Maintainers,
>  I've been spending a lot of time (since about 2013)  thinking about why
> people *stop* maintaining shared infrastructure (thanks for the shoutout
> Andy).  Jan, I'd love to talk to you more about how your motivations
> evolved. I'd also love to learn from any other maintainers about how their
> motivations changed (It doesn't have to be software). If you'd be willing
> to talk, please drop me a line. The gist of my approach is the observation
> that the negative reasons - why people stop - seem to be more helpful for
> understanding the moral reasons underlying maintenance than the positive
> reasons - why people continue. These reasons can be different because
> motivations evolve, people learn, maintenance becomes onerous etc.
>
> In relation to some of the comments in this thread, I am fairly well
> versed in the Ostromian approach to shared resources (Governing the
> Commons, 1990 and a ton of other works). This falls in the "law and
> economics approach" that Christopher mentioned above.  It is a very common
> way to analyze free and open source software, particularly when the
> objective is to come up with metrics for characterizing the projects
> themselves or to compare different cases. It is also, a very common way of
> studying natural resource commons (like forests), physical infrastructure
> commons (like irrigation systems), and digital infrastructure (like open
> source software).  Some years ago, there was also a big push to try to
> derive a policy framework for governing the "knowledge commons" (
> http://knowledge-commons.net/gkc/) using this approach.
>
> Theoretically, a major weakness of this framework is that it conflates
> initial cooperation (required to build something) with sustained
> cooperation (required to maintain something). This is largely because of
> the underlying model of human beings that it uses  (whose motivations for
> not doing something are assumed to be the exact opposite of the reasons for
> doing something) but that is another story. There are other key
> distinctions that these economic frameworks (largely) fail to make: that
> between fairness and cooperation (it assumes that if people are
> cooperating, they think it is fair), that between initital motivations and
> subsequent motivations (assumes that everyone is isolated) and that between
> natural resources and infrastructure (assumes that maintenance means
> essentially the same thing in both cases).
> And practically, very little of the evidence underlying these frameworks
> follows the same cases over time. It is more likely to look at snapshots
> across many resources at a point in time.
>
> If you are into doing some research in this area, I am happy to help
> however is most useful to you. I am also currently working on a project (to
> submit for the Ford/Sloan grant) to study what fairness means in open
> source projects, and whether we can come up with indicators of fairness to
> throw in the bag of considerations for assessing the health of projects,
> what can be done to help, etc.. It would be awesome to work together.
>
> In my own studies so far of decades old farmer managed irrigation systems,
> I found that people's motivations evolved so that moral motivations became
> more salient (I followed the same cases over three decades). In particular,
> a major reason why people stopped was that they came to perceive their
> system as unfair.  I also found that reasons for stopping maintenance were
> far more likely to concern moral elements while reasons for initiating
> cooperation were some mix of personal pleasure, gain, promise, etc. Hence
> the early comparison of reasons people stopped maintaining (
> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2802653) . There are
> a lot of questions here around what fairness means in the context of
> maintenance, how it changes, whether user governed irrigation systems are
> comparable to modern infrastructure  (yes, surprisingly so), and what
> frameworks we should use to understand these moral motivations underlying
> maintenance. I am currently working on a book that presents one
> possibility  (working title: Fairness and Cooperation). It is encouraging
> to see that the observations it is based on might not be completely wrong.
>
> I am still really curious though how these lessons from many thousands of
> years of physical infrastructure governance translate into our new digital
> world and the other way around...
>
> thanks,
> -atul
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 25, 2020 at 1:21 PM Bruce Caron <bruce at nmri.org> wrote:
>
>> Prof. Neera Singh at U Toronto is working on the role of emotional
>> commitment (affect) as a feature of commoning, <
>> https://geography.utoronto.ca/profiles/6318/>.  I suspect her work on
>> community forests in India might also apply to open-source software.
>>
>> bruce caron
>>
>> On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 12:24 PM jan <dittrich.c.jan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Maintainers,
>>>
>>> TL;DR: How are people socialized to continue to maintain (open source
>>> software)?
>>>
>>> I wonder if you know any studies that analyze what makes developers
>>> continue to maintain a piece of code, often without pay. A lot of open
>>> source culture celebrates (libertarian) freedom, creating new solutions and
>>> avoiding obligations (at least according to Nafus, 2011 [1] ).
>>> Code/Software is provided "as is", so there is no written social or (or
>>> even legal) contract to NOT leave a project, yet people seem to go through
>>> a lot of pain to maintain old code or adapt old code to changing
>>> infrastructure. I thus wonder how and why they continue to maintain in the
>>> face that a lot of the openly celebrated activities are somewhere else.
>>>
>>> Jan
>>>
>>> [1]: ‘Patches don’t have gender’: What is not open in open source
>>> software,  Dawn Nafus, 2011
>>> http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444811422887
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>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Bruce Caron, PhD
>> Executive Director
>> New Media Studio
>> Santa Barbara, CA USA
>> http://www.nmri.org
>> http://cybersocialstructure.org/
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