Studying Redflag Linux
November 7th, 2007Rereading Howard S. Becker’s Tricks of the Trade on sociological research, I started working on a mind map to illustrate which aspects one might want to consider when studying Redflag Linux. Of course, studying Redflag Linux can mean many things and includes a whole range of possible study areas. One could, for example, study it from a computer scientists’ perspective, maybe analysing the Redflag Linux distribution from an architectural point of view, showing how it is composed of different elements such as a Linux kernel, a GUI and a set of other applications. We could also, for instance, study how localisation and encoding is handled by the system. This kind of analysis would be made from a purely technological point of view, thus applying the rules of traditional technological research.
The research and its outcome will therefore all depend on the methodology applied as well as the definition of the study area. What I will try to apply for my thesis, is an approach similar to the one defined by the sociology of science which Wikipedia defines as follows (useful links to related work can be found here):
“Sociology of science is the subfield of sociology that deals with the practice of science. Generally speaking, the sociology of science involves the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing with the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity.”
The idea of my thesis would thus be to show how Redflag Linux became what it is today. In order to make such an analysis, all involved actors and objects need to be taken into account as they might have influenced the development process. My mind map which is still in a very rudimentary state, tries to identify these elements:
However, there are still some important problems in defining my topic. My main obstacle might be language. My Chinese is by far not good enough to read and understand the instructions on the Redflag website, left alone the forum posts and blog entries. I will need to decide what to do about this. Then, another problem seems to be the Redflag development process itself as I haven’t found any evidence of a source code or a open source community. I know, this again might be related to the language problem, but it might as well be that Redflag is developed in a different way than other open source projects. What worries me here is not that the Redflag development model is non-standard, but rather that, if this is really the case, it will be very difficult to find more information about the development process. However, as the Asianux source code is available online and as Redflag claims to be based on Asianux, analysing the Asianux development process might be an alternative.