Archive for January, 2010

The power of community put into practice

Published by Sander van der Waal on January 26, 2010 in Development and Community. 1 Comment

At OSS Watch, we actively promote that there is more to open source software than just a licence. Open source projects should use not just an OSI-approved licence but practice the open development method and if they want to become sustainable they should be building a community around their project. Once in a while, we come across a nice example of how the power of the community can be beneficial, and recently one of these examples occurred.

It started with an application that has been built by Nick Burch at the Apache Software Foundation to facilitate the search of geographically ‘nearby people’. He made this little Django application available via a Subversion repository with an Apache licence.

Linking people and projects is also one of the aims of the project registry framework Simal that OSS Watch is involved in. On Simal’s public demo site there is a collection of projects and people working on these projects. Besides doing development work on the Simal application OSS Watch is starting to use the registry more often in our daily work. Unfortunately, we recently failed to find out about a project that was run at our institution, Oxford University, even though it was present in our public registry.

When I realised Simal was lacking functionality that had been useful for OSS Watch, i.e. to find nearby projects based on location, I created issue 263 for Simal, dumping my thoughts about possible solutions, among which the ASF application on nearby people.

A key problem in adding this functionality was to have the geo-location data of the institutions that are in involved in the projects. This prompted Ross to reach out to his wider community to see whether anyone had tackled this issue.

The first and very useful suggestion on this matter was from Paul Stainthorp who pointed to a list of UK universities and their geo-location, which is maintained at Wolverhampton university.

The second one was from Sam Easterby-Smith who pointed to a list on Wikipedia. That was a good one, as Wikipedia is quite complete and geo-tagged, so we would have the data from that source if only we had a convenient way of extracting it.

The solution to that problem is to use DBpedia and it was suggested both by James, who added a comment to the issue in the tracker, and by Wilbert Kraan on Twitter. DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and it provides a public SPARQL endpoint for querying Wikipedia data. We can conveniently query that endpoint for a list of the geo locations of al UK universities and add that data to our Simal repository.

So within one working day we have a solution to the main problem, getting the geo-location data. But Ross’s discussion with someone already doing this revealed that they are manually creating the data, so they can potentially benefit from our search and automate it, if they want to. Furthermore, someone on Twitter noticed our search and he indicated that he would be interested in the solution, so potentially more people and/or projects can benefit. Furthermore, since everything happened completely in the open, even more people have the opportunity to find our solution and use it in their own problem space.

To me, this is a perfect illustration of the power of community. There is just so much that we all collectively know and by having your project run out in the open, freely accessible by everyone, enables you to tap into the collective knowledge of many experts. If this is not a reason to use the open development method, I don’t know what is.

Control versus community

Published by Elizabeth Tatham on January 23, 2010 in Community. 1 Comment

Running an open source project without a governance model is like building a house without plans: a recipe for disaster. A governance model describes how a project is managed and how third parties can interact with that project. In particular, it describes how decisions are made within the project, the ground rules for participation in the project and the processes for communicating and sharing within the project team and the community.

The community is the lifeblood of the project and as such should be protected and nurtured. One of the most important aspects of this is the licensing of the project. There are several types of open source licence available; the choice will depend on the future plans for the software.

Contrary to the traditional concept of a licence, open source licences are designed to increase rather than restrict the freedom of the licensee, to encourage contributions to its functionality by modifying the source code. The GPL, for example, is a copyleft licence designed to ensure that the code it covers remains free and open source by dictating that derivative works, should they be distributed, inherit the same licence as their parent project and cannot be incorporated into non-FOSS products. At the other end of the spectrum is the permissive licence, such as the Apache Software License. Unlike copyleft licences, it allows the inclusion of FOSS in non-FOSS projects and the licensing of derivative works in any way the distributor pleases.

What implications does the choice of licence have on community development? Copyleft licences may restrict the uptake of the code, and therefore the size of the community, because of their ‘viral’ nature: they are seen to ‘infect’ all derivative software with the same restrictions, thus limiting the business models available to projects building on that code. Since copyright holders have additional rights over licences, centralised ownership of copyleft-licensed materials can add additional community concerns because of the scope for ‘abuse’ of that community. Witness the case of Oracle’s planned buyout of Sun, which would make Oracle the exclusive holder of the open source MySQL copyright and trademark. This could have potentially damaging consequences for the project’s future, and possibly result in higher prices for database software.

Permissive licences, on the other hand, encourage greater uptake of the software and wider participation from outside the project because they don’t dictate terms under which derivatives can be distributed. Thus, relinquishing control over what can be done with the code fosters community development, which in turn increases the opportunities for innovation. Permissive licences allow almost any business model except dual licensing and are therefore more appealing to commercial developers.

The contrast between copyleft and permissive licences is illustrated by SpringSource’s recent decision to move from the GPL to the Eclipse Public License (EPL) for its OSGi application server. The company originally chose the GPL because, in the words of CEO Rod Johnson, ‘there’s a lot of technical innovation under the hood [and] if we’re giving that technology away in open source, we wanted others who build on it to also give away results in open source’. The move to the EPL suggests that the company recognises the value of a wider adoption of their technology through more permissive licensing and collaborative community development.

However, permissive licences don’t ensure the ongoing freedom advocated by Richard Stallman, which underpins the FOSS philosophy. Significantly, though, Stallman is himself beginning to accept that they are sometimes necessary, as evidenced in a recent article in which he admits to having mixed feelings on selling licence exceptions. Could this shift in Stallman’s thinking be evidence of a fundamental change in the broader licensing landscape?

Software Developers for Haiti

Published by Ross Gardler on January 22, 2010 in Development, Discussion, Software and Community. 1 Comment

Some time ago I posted “Does it take a disaster to understand the power of open development?” Unfortunately it is now time to revisit that post with a call for software developers to help Haiti.

The Sahana Software Foundation are looking for additional developers to help with Sahana, a disaster management tool. They need to continue to build an information portal that is seeing increased interest and usage to assist organisations responding to events in Haiti. Information on the work underway can be found on the Sahana Haiti response Overview page.

The skills they are primarily looking for are (you don’t need them all, any will do):

  •  Python - the main development for SahanaPy is Python (we’re not using PHP for this instance)
  •  web2py - Sahana uses the web2py enterprise framework for SahanaPy (I’m told it is fairly easy to learn if you’re used to Django)
  •  OpenLayers
  •  jQuery

To find out more and offer your help please jump onto #sahana on freenode. Please give as much or as little as you want.Some of the core devs have been working really long hours the past 5-6 days, and any additional resource would assist us greatly, particularly as the effort is really starting to get some interest, traction and coverage, which leads to more and more feature requests.

Thanks for reading this far - please consider giving a few hours of your time to help out, if you can.

Building an Engaged Community

Published by Alan Bell on January 19, 2010 in Event, Development and Community. 0 Comments

On 7 December 2009 OSS Watch hosted a mini conference in Oxford, at the University Club. There were two workshops running concurrently, one on Open Source, Open Development and Open Innovation, which we wrote about last month, and the other on Building an Engaged Community, which is the subject of this article. During the workshops we ran a live blog for remote attendees; you can see a transcript here. Amir Nettler of OSS Watch covered the morning sessions and I picked up the reins for the afternoon.

The workshop was introduced by Steve Lee, who gave a high-level overview of the topic, focussing on the open development model and what a strong community looks like, as distinct from the open source code that they may be working on. The need for a wide and diverse community of contributors was stressed: not just programmers but contributors with all skills are important, including artwork, marketing, testing, documentation, etc. A good community should be able to sustain itself and cope with people leaving and new people joining. The key to this has to be transparency: all the history and previous decisions should be open for new contributors to review, which will prevent settled issues from being re-raised by people who missed the original discussion.

The licensing and legal considerations of an open project are very important for the community. Contributors need to be sure they have the legal right to give their contributions to the project and if necessary modify the terms of non-disclosure agreements or contracts of employment that could otherwise cause problems down the line. Some projects have contributor license agreements to protect the provenance of contributions; this is something a new project should seriously consider. To provide more information on this OSS Watch has produced a briefing paper on contributor licence agreements.

There is a wide range of free and open source tools for managing a distributed community-based open development project. Most community projects have some kind of shared communication system such as a mailing list or forum; critical to this is the history or mailing list archive being publicly available to new contributors. If the code is open but the communications are closed, the community will struggle to grow. A version control system should be used right from the start of a project to track who contributed which bits of code. A structured system distinct from the project communication system is used for tracking bugs.

Sebastian Brännström of Symbian treated us to a beautifully designed set of slides for his presentation, on how Symbian is moving from a very closed platform to an open development model. Sebastian has written open source software to run on Symbian and now works in delivery management for the Symbian foundation. In terms of governance, the foundation is set up as an independent not-for-profit organisation, which facilitates development but doesn’t actually do development as part of its activities. The foundation started with 12 member organisations, which has now risen to about 180, and has 90 employees. In order to give structure to the governance of such a large project it created four councils to control different aspects of the platform: features and roadmap; user interface; architecture; release management. An interesting aspect was the deliberate selection of structures that make it easy for anyone to influence the direction of the project, not just the larger members such as handset manufacturers.

Sander van der Waal told us about his work with the Apache Felix project. Apache Felix is an implementation of a standard framework called OSGi which defines a modular system for Java applications which amongst other things allows parts of a system to be updated whilst it is running, a powerful feature for highly reliable applications. When Sander got involved in Apache Felix it was in the Apache Incubator, which is a part of the Apache project where young projects are guided through the community building process. His project team started by reading and following the mailing lists for some time before joining in. They found it important to keep all communication on the list. This included communication between colleagues, even where a direct communication option was available, as it was better to keep it to the list so that the information could be shared and archived. Sander went on to explain how the integration of an issue tracker and revision control system is used in conjunction with a mailing list, allowing visibility of who contributed each line of code and which issue each change addresses.

Mark Johnson of Taunton’s College gave a talk on getting started in joining a community from a development perspective. Mark started contributing bug fixes to the Moodle virtual learning environment and took us on an introspective tour of the sequence of events as he progressed from using and administering a Moodle installation to being a part of the community that produces it. Collaboration is an important aspect of open dev, and Mark thinks, if done properly, a collaborative development process produces the best results. As well as raising his personal profile, Mark has benefited from the quality checking and motivation that working with others provides. Mark went on to warn of the dangers of over-collaboration: soliciting opinions from too many people leads to confusion, and bad design. He suggested limiting how widely you consult in discussion phase, produce a prototype/proposal and then have that critiqued; the existence of a tangible contribution limits how widely people’s suggestions can range. You don’t need to please everyone all the time, the objective is writing great software and some healthy disagreement and debate is a part of this.

Steve Lee then kicked off a session on evaluating the openness and sustainability of open source projects using an online form developed by OSS Watch.

This was an audience participation activity, which gave me a bit of a break from the live blogging and a chance to take a quick photo of the audience as they gathered in clusters around an assortment of laptops. I counted three Macbooks, four running some kind of Linux, and three on Windows. Everything points to a more diverse computing landscape over the next few years, with different devices talking to each other using open standard protocols and formats.

I found the results of the activity very interesting in that the audience had no problems choosing projects they were working on or in their own specialist area of interest. Nobody attempted to evaluate the projects with the broadest appeal, such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org. I think this, and the range of resulting scores, points to the evaluation having good practical value for the OSS Watch sector.

The event closed with a panel session in each room, I will pick out a few topics that were covered; there is more in the transcript. The first questions were “Should a project accept all contributions” and “does it matter if a contribution is ignored?” All the panel members stressed the importance of managing contributions and responding to contributors; if a contribution is not used it is critical to provide feedback so that the next contribution meets the required standards for acceptance. Sebastian Brännström said that taking contributions seriously was critical to keeping users and the community happy.

The discussion moved on to the issues faced by smaller projects with a team of core contributors. In order to increase the number of active contributors projects should focus first on increasing the number of non-contributing users and lower the barriers to new contributors, helping users progress to being contributors.

The final question was “What pub are we going to?” the answer to which turned out to be the “Far From the Madding Crowd” where discussions continued into the evening.

Learn to build W3C compliant widgets with Apache Wookie (Incubating)

Published by Sander van der Waal on January 19, 2010 in Development, Standards and Community. 0 Comments

Are you interested in widget development and do you want to learn how to build widgets that use the new open W3C widget standard? OSS Watch is organising an Apache Wookie (Incubating) training day in Oxford, UK on 11 February 2010 for developers who would like to get hands-on experience with building widgets using Wookie.

Wookie provides an implementation of the W3C widget standard and allows you to write, deploy and manage W3C compliant widgets easily. The project is also working on implementing extra modules, such as a Google Wave Gadgets API. To increase cross-platform interoperability, several plugins have been written to integrate with other systems, such as Moodle and Wordpress.

This event is free of charge and invitation only. However, we have three open places left for interested developers. General development skills are required, but you don’t need to have specific experience in building widgets. If you are interested we welcome you to contact us on info@oss-watch.ac.uk and let us know why you should to be there. If you would like to know more, details about this all day event can be found on the event page.

One of the reasons we hold this event is in preparation for the dev8D developer days. During that event we will be doing more widget development in a Wookie hackathon and we want to gather some more skilled widget developers for that hackathon. Therefore we expect people who come to the Wookie training day to also attend the dev8D days. However, don’t hesitate to contact us for the Wookie training day if you can’t make it to dev8D.