Digifesto

Some recent chats with Chris Holdgraf and colleagues at NYU interested in “critical digital infrastracture” have gotten me thinking again about the sustainability and autonomy of open source projects again.

I’ll admit to having had naive views about this topic in the past. Certainly, doing empirical data science work on open source software projects has given me a firmer perspective on things. Here are what I feel are the hardest earned insights on the matter:

• There is tremendous heterogeneity in open source software projects. Almost all quantitative features of these projects fall in log-normal distributions. This suggests that the keys to open source software success are myriad and exogenous (how the technology fits in the larger ecosystem, how outside funding and recognition is accomplished, …) rather than endogenous factors (community policies, etc.) While many open source projects start as hobby and unpaid academic projects, those that go on to be successful find one or more funding sources. This funding is an exogenous factor.
• The most significant exogenous factors to an open source software project’s success are the industrial organization of private tech companies. Developing an open technology is part of the strategic repertoire of these companies: for example, to undermine the position of a monopolist, developing an open source alternative decreases barriers to market entry and allows for a more competitive field in that sector. Another example: Google funded Mozilla for so long arguably to deflect antitrust action over Google Chrome.
• There is some truth to Chris Kelty’s idea of open source communities as recursive publics, cultures that have autonomy that can assert political independence at the boundaries of other political forces. This autonomy comes from: the way developers of OSS get specific and valuable human capital in the process of working with the software and their communities; the way institutions begin to depend on OSS as part of their technical stack, creating an installed base; and how many different institutions may support the same project, creating competition for the scarce human capital of the developers. Essentially, at the point where the software and the skills needed to deploy it effectively and the community of people with those skills is self-organized, the OSS community has gained some economic and political autonomy. Often this autonomy will manifest itself in some kind of formal organization, whether a foundation, a non-profit, or a company like Redhat or Canonical or Enthought. If the community is large and diverse enough it may have multiple organizations supporting it. This is in principle good for the autonomy of the project but may also reflect political tensions that can lead to a schism or fork.
• In general, since OSS development is internally most often very fluid, with the primary regulatory mechanism being the fork, the shape of OSS communities is more determined by exogenous factors than endogenous ones. When exogenous demand for the technology rises, the OSS community can find itself with a ‘surplus’, which can be channeled into autonomous operations.