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

Mon Aug 31 13:51:04 EDT 2020

Hi all,

This conversation is timely, as I saw a new thesis title awaiting approval in the collection I maintain as I read these emails. Now that it has been published, I'd like to share S. Alex Yun's MMath thesis, Personality Traits of GitHub Maintainers and Their Effects on Project Success<http://hdl.handle.net/10012/16195>, with their permission, as well as a related IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering proceeding<https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2960357>.

Jordan
---
Jordan Hale (they/them/theirs)
Digital Repositories Librarian, University of Waterloo
jordan.hale at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:jordan.hale at uwaterloo.ca>
519 888 4567 x40135

On Aug 27, 2020, at 10:45 AM, Stephanie Beth Jordan <stephaniebeth at protonmail.com<mailto:stephaniebeth at protonmail.com>> wrote:

Echo!

And thank you all for this fantastic thread.

This discussion of fairness resonates with my field experience of sensor networks in the climate and ocean sciences (which importantly supports maintenance positions through continued investment from the National Science Foundation and other entrepreneurial interests, a factor that makes it distinct from open source communities). For my field, a prominent reality for those that have left that may fall under this rubric of fairness is: overt gender inequity and, for some, cases of sexual violence. These realities draw attention to the intersectional oppressions faced by maintainers, both those who stay and those who decide to "stop".

Thank you for sharing this incredibly rich work with us, Atul! I look forward to engaging more and continued conversations.

Warmly,
Steph

Department of Media and Information
Center for Gender in a Global Context
Michigan State University
stephaniebethjordan.com<http://stephaniebethjordan.com>

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On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 9:54 AM, James Howison <jhowison at ischool.utexas.edu<mailto:jhowison at ischool.utexas.edu>> wrote:
Bravo!

James Howison

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

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