OSS Watch team blog

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure to give a talk about Open source software in Further Education in the UK at a BCS event in Newcastle. One of the questions from the audience was ‘Do you think that the current financial crisis will push for more open source in education?’.  Of course, I have no idea. On the one hand, tighter budgets may encourage ICT managers to get out of their comfort zone and try open source to cut costs. But on the other hand, it is known that some closed source vendors (e.g. Microsoft) sell software to educational institutions for a low price, and arguably it would make sense for them even to give it away. It is a legitimate business strategy: get a large user base by giving your product to young people who cannot really afford it anyway, and have them buy it when they go into industry and do not know how to use anything else.

But more interestingly, the above question begets another one. What would be the reasons for educational institutions to adopt open source?. Cost does not seem to be a clear one. Another reason to try open source could be better interoperability, robustness, features, etc. But ICT managers may favour familiarity with the system rather than migrating to a new system, even if it is potentially better from a technical point of view. And not all open source software is technically better than its closed alternatives.

So maybe we should look for the reasons to adopt open source somewhere else. The main characteristic of open source, if done properly, is that it promotes the formation of a community of people who can get involved with the project. This is arguably a good thing in education: engaging students and letting them play with the tools. Open source projects also function as a tutoring environment, where students can learn good practice from more experienced users and developers.

Thus, maybe the main reason for promoting open source in education is that it will help students learn more. But how? In fact, the ‘why’ leads to the ‘how’. If open source is to be successful in education, it cannot be just a matter of policy or, in general, a top-down approach. Its community and playful nature needs to be acknowledged and promoted amongst students, be it through local Linux User Groups (LUGs), creating fun projects (write a computer game in a collaborative way), or joining external projects.

Massiel is, at this point, a small study hosted by Google Code of whether some open source projects depend on a fixed subset of people, or whether they are sustainable and new generations of community members can take over. And we are doing it a la open research.

Massiel was born as part of a short collaboration between OSS Watch (UK) and Libresoft (Spain), and informed by our Profiling Communities Expert Workshop. In short, Massiel is so far an attempt to extend  FLOSSMetrics, providing scripts for higher level analysis of databases created from projects’ svn logs and mailing lists (we have imported some code from CVSAnalY to do this). We are also exploring with Andrea Wiggins the use of workflows like those in myExperiment.

So why bother? Because even though OSS Watch is not a research group, data to back our advice to projects and institutions is very useful. This is important, for example, to avoid confirmation bias. That is, to avoid cherry picking information that confirms what we think about software projects and communities, while snubbing facts that contradict our beliefs.

The Profiling Communities workshop that we ran on July 11 addressed interesting questions. How can research be useful to evaluate open software communities? What is available in terms of data, tools, scientific methodology and algorithms? What would be interesting to measure?

The bit about open research just means that instead of running the study behind closed doors, and then one day publishing the results in a subscription journal, we make the data, methodology and intermediate results available right from the beginning.

This is more convenient for dissemination, but also a more effective collaboration framework for this project. The collaboration started when Israel Herraiz from Libresoft came to OSS Watch for a 1 month internship. In this case, starting a Google Code project was an easy way of setting up the infrastructure for the project (version control for the code, an issue tracker, mailing lists…), allowing it to survive past the 1 month internship, and at the same time enabling contributions from other people.

In addition to the purely utilitarian side of it, it could be argued that open research is better value for society than the more widespread subscription journal alternative. Scott Aaronson’s “Review of The Access Principle by John Willinsky” notes (with a good sense of humour) that researches and their institutions are using their time and resources to produce a wealth of invaluable scientific knowledge, that they give away to private publishing conglomerates. And this knowledge, produced by the scientific community and often funded with public money, remains closed and expensive, not only to the general public, but to the scientific community itself.