Managing the Bazaar

PhD Thesis: Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects. Evangelia Berdou.

URL = http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/PhD_Berdou.pdf

Description

Glyn Moody:

"As open source becomes more widely used, people have started exploring how and why its approach to developing software works so well. The pioneering analysis here is Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar, but that was largely describing a prelapsarian world of free software with little commercialisation. An intriguing question is how the bazaar functions in the corrupting presence of serious dosh.

That, in part, is what a PhD thesis from Evangelia Berdou seeks to answer. Its full title is “Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects.” The “mature” projects refer to GNOME and KDE, which is another reason to take a look: hitherto, people have tended to concentrate on GNU/Linux when analysing free software. Given that GNOME and KDE are both very different projects, and represent a later generation of free software, it's useful to have more data on them.

The thesis packed with lots of interesting figures, diagrams, tables and charts, mostly drawing on extensive interviews with people within the GNOME and KDE worlds. It turns out that many more coders in GNOME are paid to work on the project compared to KDE." (http://www.computerworlduk.com/toolbox/open-source/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=14&entryid=1361)

Introduction

From the author:

"The thesis investigates two fundamental dynamics of participation and collaboration in mature, community-led Free/Open Source (F/OS) software projects - commercialization and peripheral participation. The aim of the thesis is to examine whether the power relations that underlie the F/OS model of development are indicative of a new form of power relations supported by ICTs.

Theoretically, the thesis is located within the Communities of Practice (CoP) literature and it draws upon Michel Foucault’s ideas about the historical and relational character of power. It also mobilizes, to a lesser extent, Erving Goffman’s notion of ‘face-work’. This framework supports a methodology that questions the rationality of how F/OS is organized and examines the relations between employed coders and volunteers, experienced and inexperienced coders, and programmers and nonprogrammers. The thesis examines discursive and structural dimensions of collaboration and employs quantitative and qualitative methods. Structural characteristics are considered in the light of arguments about embeddedness.

The thesis contributes insights into how the gift economy is embedded in the exchange economy and the role of peripheral contributors. The analysis indicates that community-integrated paid developers have a key role in project development, maintaining the infrastructure aspects of the code base. The analysis suggests that programming and non-programming contributors are distinct in their make-up, priorities and rhythms of participation, and that learning plays an important role in controlling access. The results show that volunteers are important drivers of peripheral activities, such as translation and documentation. The term ‘autonomous peripherality’ is used to capture the unique characteristics of these activities. These findings support the argument that centrality and peripherality are associated with the division of labour, which, in turn, is associated with employment relations and frameworks of institutional support.

The thesis shows how the tensions produced by commercialization and peripheral participation are interwoven with values of meritocracy, ritual and strategic enactment of the idea of community as well as with tools and techniques developed to address the emergence of a set of problems specific to management and governance. These are characterized as ‘technologies of communities’. It is argued that the emerging topology of F/OS participation, seen as a ‘relational meshwork’, is indicative of a redefinition of the relationship between sociality and economic production within mature, community-led F/OS projects."

Contents

"The thesis is structured as follows:

In Chapter 2 the theoretical and conceptual framework of the research is presented and discussed.

In Chapter 3 the methodology of the research is outlined and the primary case studies and research design are presented in detail.

In Chapter 4 the analysis of the empirical findings relating to commercialization is presented.

In Chapter 5 the analysis of the empirical findings concerning access and cooperative relations between new and experienced programmers and between programmers and nonprogrammers is presented.

In Chapter 6 the results of the quantitative investigation of the network of GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. members and of the two projects’ maintainer networks are outlined.

Chapter 7 provides a synthesis and a discussion of the empirical findings in light of the theoretical framework adopted and the principal research questions.

Chapter 8 discusses the contribution of the research in the context of related work, the limitations of the study and avenues for future research.

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