looking east

Technical objects define in their configuration a certain partition of the physical and social world, they attribute roles to certain types of actors - humans and non-humans - and exclude others, they authorise certain modes of relations between these different actors […] in such a way that they participate as a whole to the construction of a culture in the anthropological sense of the term, and, at the same time, they become enforced mediators in all relations that we are maintaining with the “real”.

Madelaine Akrich, Comment décrire les objets techniques?

Later in her paper, Madelaine Akrich introduces the term “script” to refer to the behaviour of a technical object. The “script” is the program which the original developers write in order to define how the object can be used by its users.

For the purpose of studying FOSS in Asia, the technical object would be a piece of FOS software, its behaviour is defined by the source code, and the users are people who are using this software from within the borders of what is defined as Asia.

However, the scope of my master thesis as described above is not complete. FOS software has a specific characteristic which is related to it’s licensing terms. I don’t want to enter into FOSS licensing in detail, but I would like to emphasise one interesting aspect of open source software: modifiability. This means, we can take a piece of existing FOS software and tailor it to our needs. Going back to Madelaine Akrich’s definition of the “script”, this means that the “script” can be modified by its users. We are thus moving away from the traditional developer-user model to a more distributed open source community development model. In FOSS, users are not stuck with a pre-defined script, rather they are encouraged to change the script according to their needs. This in turn, forces users to think about the software in terms of its utility to an individual.

To be honest, the source code or “script” cannot be changed by any random user. Instead, this freedom is restricted to people who are familiar with computer programming. However, FOSS has made it easy for users to give feedback, propose new features, and report bugs. You don’t need to be a programmer to do this, though you still need to be able to use a computer and run the program.

Implementing modifiability into objects is not new, although the open source movement and its derivatives have been strongly promoted lately. In his book Two Bits, Kelty investigates the impact of modifiability on culture, he writes:

But what is the cultural significance of modifiability? What does it mean to plan in modifiability to culture, to music, to education and science? At a clerical level, such a question is obvious whenever a scholar cannot recover a document written in WordPerfect 2.0 or on a disk for which there are no longer disk drives, or when a library archive considers saving both the media and the machines that read that media. Modifiability is an imperative for building infrastructures that can last longer. However, it is not only a solution to a clerical problem: it creates new possibilities and new problems for long-settled practices like publication, or the goals and structure of intellectual-property systems, or the definition of the finality, lifetime, monumentality, and especially, the identity of a work. Long-settled, seemingly unassailable practices — like the authority of published books or the power of governments to control information—are suddenly confounded and denaturalized by the techniques of modifiability. (page 12)

Modifiability is at the core of FOSS. It’s one of the main reasons why FOSS communities have emerged. It’s at the base of almost all discussions on mailinglists, forums, IRC channels and FOSS events. The users and developers can decide the future of the software by participating in these discussions. The fact that a FOSS culture has emerged around open source software, proves Madelaine Akrich’s point that technical objetcts are important elements in the construction of cultures. And, of course, despite it’s modifiability, FOS software has a “script” which clearly defines how it’s supposed to be used

The next Beijing Open Party will take place on July 19th at the Thoughtworks offices in Beijing. If you want to give a talk, you can propose it on the Beijing Open Party google group. Alternatively you can also just show up at the party and propose your topic. The party’s original announcement can be found here.

Event:  BeijingOpenParty July: Summer Daydreams (仲夏梦舞)
Date: July 19th
Time:  13.30 - 17.30
Address:  Room 1105, 11th Floor GuoHua Plaza, No.3 Dongzhimen South Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing, China, 100007, see map.

Yesterday I attended my first Beijing Open Party, a monthly techie unconference event which takes place at the offices of ThoughtWorks here in Beijing. It’s similar to Barcamp, and it’s great fun. This was the first time they were proposing an English track, however, there was only one presentation in English yesterday. Topics ranged from Django over programming in different languages to event-driven architectures and StarDict. About 60-80 (estimation varying depending on who I talked to) people attended the event.

The party started with a stand-up in which everyone introduced themselves, and a presentation on NGO work after the earthquake in Sichuan. After the intro, people were asked to propose their topics, and give a quick talk about what they were going to present. Presentations took place in four different rooms, and there was a total of 12 talks.

I don’t know yet when the next Beijing Open Party will take place, but I will post it here as soon as I find out.

Yesterday, the Quadcopter group of the Beijing LUG met at the Exoweb office to assemble the pieces of the boarduino  microcontrollers. We had lots of fun, and I learned a great deal about hardware, soldering, resistors, LED’s, analog, and digital pins, as well as microchips. Although the Quadcopter group’s final goal is to build a quadcopter, the microcontrolles we built yesterday were rather an educational experiment in which we tried to understand the internals of the boarduino.

The boarduino is an Open Source arduino clone which can run the same software as the arduino. Unfortunately, we didn’t succeed in loading the bootloader to the chip yesterday, so we will need to wait for next time to start programming.

I came to Beijing a bit over a week ago to start the field study for my thesis on Open Source in China. I was quite sad to leave Thailand and Codegent, but I had always planned to go to China, so it doesn’t really come as a surprise. Additionally,  I was offered a great opportunity to do my research on the job at Exoweb here in Beijing. As an intern, I will be dividing my time between software development and open source, and, of course, I will regularly blog about my experiences. Looking forward to what comes next…

“Patch hoarding” refers to not committing kernel changes to the kernel trunk which has been a constant issue in the Linux community. At the CELF Embedded Linux Conference last week, Andrew Morton explained the why companies and developers should commit their changes to the kernel:

“One of the areas that he is most concerned about is the practice of “patch hoarding”—holding on to kernel changes as patches without submitting them upstream to the kernel hackers. It is hopefully only due to a lack of resources, but he has heard that some are doing it to try and gain a competitive advantage. This is simply wrong, he said, companies have a ‘moral if not legal obligation‘ to submit those patches.

There are many good reasons for getting code merged upstream that Morton outlined. The code will be better because of the review done by the kernel hackers; once it is done, the maintenance cost falls to near zero as well. He also touted the competitive advantage, noting that getting your code merged means that you have won—competing proposals won’t get in. Being the first to merge a feature can make it easier on yourself and harder on your competition.

There are downsides to getting your code upstream as well. Most of those stem from not getting code out there early enough for review. The kernel developers can ask for significant changes to the code especially in the area of user space interfaces. If a company already has lots of code using the new feature and/or interface, it could be very disruptive; ‘sorry, there’s no real fix for that except getting your code out early enough‘.

Another downside that companies may run into is with competitors being brought into the process. Morton and other kernel hackers will try to find others who might have a stake in a new feature to get them involved so that everybody’s needs are taken into account. This can blunt the “win” of getting your feature merged. Some are also concerned that competitors will get access to the code once it has been submitted; ‘tough luck’ Morton said, ‘everything in the kernel is GPL’.”

Read the full story on LWN.net here.

This post is part of a series of posts I am planning to write on communication over the internet. The style is slightly different from my previous posts as I am trying to use a more ’sociological’ approach to writing as an exercise for my master thesis.

It’s 11.35, I got up a few hours ago, started my two computers, reinstalled Ubuntu on my old one after not being able to make wlan run with Nexenta OS. While installing the updates for Ubuntu Gutsy on one computer, I start up my gmail, xchat-gnome, and skype on my other one. I was not able to use wireless on my new computer so far, but now it seems to work. I am just not sure how long it will last before it freezes again. I installed the proper drivers yesterday, but in a first test, it still didn’t seem to work. Maybe today’s Ubuntu Hardy updates did the trick to stabilize NetworkManager for my wlan card. It will take some time to test this though. So far, I am just happy it works.

It’s Saturday morning, Easter for Christians, most IRC channels are empty. I can see people in the channels, but there is only little discussion going on. Most of the people on IRC I know, just leave their computers on, so their name shows up in the user list, but they are really away from keyboard (afk). Some people have their IRC software configured to start up automatically when they start their computers. Most of them connect to the same channels on each startup. I currently have 18 channels in my list. However, as I am working on a new computer, I will most likely add some more channels today. I used to be in about 30 channels, but I forgot to backup my settings for gnome-xchat, I don’t want to go digg into my 3 gigabyte backup of my old system.

In most channels I am just a listener, observing what is going on. The programming language (e.g. python, ruby, erlang) and framework channels (e.g. rubyonrails, django) are always quite busy. Except if I have a question or there is a discussion about something I am familiar with, I won’t speak on these channels. I do believe though that they are a good place to see what’s happening in the programming communities. I often also pick up new technologies and stuff there that I would have not necessarily found in other places like Google search or blogs.

Right now, gnome-xchat shows activities in the channels django, haskell, python, rubyonrails, ubuntu-cn (all freenode), as well as the ubuntu channel (ubuntu server). All other channels just display notifications about who has entered and who has left. If a channel is very inactive, the log will only contain messages of people entering and leaving. Some channels I am in, are used for internal company discussions. Many companies seem to use IRC nowadays. Other channels are for events like Barcamp Bangkok, or the GNOME Asia Summit with discussions among people who know each other and who are in the channel to keep in touch, discuss event organization, technical questions, and whatever else they want to share with the channel users. On the other channels, I only know people by their IRC nicknames. Depending on where people live, they have different rhythms on IRC. European users generally log in when it’s afternoon in Asia, and American will say ‘good morning’ when I am ready to go to sleep.

Currently I am only in one channel that requires the UTF-8 character set. It’s ubuntu-cn (freenode) which is for discussions on Ubuntu in Chinese. It’s a very active channel with people constantly posting questions, answers, and remarks. At this time, they are 50 persons logged in. Unfortunately, all discussions are in Chinese. But from the English bits of text like Linux commands and user status notifications, I can partly guess what is being discussed.

As I am writing this, the computer makes regularly beeps whenever a Twitter update comes in. I have only joined Twitter some months ago, but since I have decided to follow a few people, it has become more and more an interesting tool to communicate and just send out unimportant stuff about myself. Among the people around Barcamp Bangkok, there are a number of very active Twitter users, so while I am writing this, I am constantly informed about what they are currently doing. Twitter is also used as a way of communication similar to IRC for Barcamp Bangkok. As a matter of fact, Twitter is currently even more active than the IRC channel.

I remember a lengthy discussion I had with Basile about two years ago after reading this article in the Wired magazine about China’s great firewall. I wrote a blog post about it on my old blog, and I want to cite two paragraphs here:

“The teacher of the course thinks that many of the blogs are just a kind of self-profiling, meaning that the importance doesn’t lie in the content of what a blogger really thinks, but rather in the fact that they are cited in other places. As an example he translated Wozy Yins blog where he writes: ‘I am in the Wired!’ which means that he is rather proud of it. ”

“Another thing that I was wondering about is if the Chinese really feel like victims of this online censorship, or if it is a Western attitude to believe that the information of the internet should be freely accessible to everyone?”

This is the first time I am in China with my own computer, and I have to admit that China’s great firewall seems rather annoying to me:

• Wikipedia is blocked
• Feedburner is blocked
• wordpress.com is blocked
• del.icio.us is sometimes blocked
• flickr is sometimes blocked
• Skype is working
• IRC is working
• Gmail is working

I know there are plenty of ways around it, but still, these are websites I regularly visit. Especially feedburner is hard as this prevents me from reading a very large portion of my daily feeds. This means that if Chinese software developers want to stay up to date with what’s happening in the techie world, they’ll have to use proxies and ssh tunnels. It also means that software developers are heavily affected by the Chinese online censorship. Although I know that they are not very worried about it, I still believe that it’s just one more obstacle to China’s participation in open source. It also made me think that maybe the government doesn’t really want Chinese to actively participate in open source communities as this could encourage people to think about free information, available source code, and open collaboration.

At LIFT08, Gen Kanai gave a very insightful talk about the state of open source in Asia. In his presentation, he mentions this interview with Linus Torvalds where Linus cites the following reasons for the low participation in open source in regions other than North America and Western Europe:

• Language
• Culture
• Education

Gen Kanai adds another factor this list:

• Economy

Language

Language is definitely a problem, at least from what I have seen in Thailand. However, even though Thai developers don’t tend to speak much English (probably they are just shy), they have a very good notion of written English. The same is valid for China. Hence, language as such is an issue, but probably not the main reason why open source contributions from Asia are scarce.

Culture

Culture is a big word. It can incluce pretty much anything, and it’s often very easy to say that culture is a problem. From what I have heard at the Linux Developer Symposium in Beijing, Gen Kanai’s talk at LIFT08, and some other sources, one main issue is considered to be the “direct” communication among community members. Mailinglist posts sometimes can be quite rude and it’s definitely not considered polite by Asian standards. However, it’s not considered polite by western standards either. Andrew Morton insisted at the Linux Developer Symposium on not taking these reactions too personal:

“The problem is, one person says something, and though not everyone agrees, nobody contradicts. Today it’s not as bad as it used to be, and it’s important not to forget: these people don’t speak for anybody else, they only speak for themselves.”

Although I do think that rudeness is a problem, I am not sure about how much this problem is related to culture. I mean, why are there only few women involved in software development in general and open source in particular? I think this is at least partly due to the fact that open source development is dominated by Western males. I believe that if more women were involved in open source, it would become more attractive for other women. The same holds for Asians. If they see that other Asians are involved, they will be more motivated to join. People tend to hang out with people who share common backgrounds and interests.

Education

I don’t agree with Linus in this point. He says that education is not a problem for Asia. However, I do believe it is a problem. Not education in a general term, but more specifically education in the sense of creating awareness about open source. It seems that open source as it is taught at universities in Thailand and China, is mainly concerned with how to make use of open source without mentioning communites, philosophy, and participation.

Now thinking back, when I was at university, I am quite sure that I didn’t hear about open source from a professor. It was all implicit. Most computers ran Linux, all software developed by the university was freely available online, everyone, including professors, assistants, and students simply lived open source. There was no need to explicitely teach us. What does that mean for Asia? Probably, universities in Asia (though I only can speak for Thailand and China), do not really “live”open source, the students therefore don’t have enough examples and don’t get inspired by the open source spirit. I don’t think Asia needs government support as it was discussed at the Linux Developer Symposium. I think all it needs are role models, individuals who are passionate about open source, who are actively involved in the community and who are motivating other people to do the same thing.

Economy

Economy is definitely a reason why companies don’t contribute to open source. Often, tight schedules, lack of human resources and so on will prevent them from doing so. Additionally, the traditional view of competition in the software sector continues to prevail in many parts of Asia, and the open source business model hasn’t reached many companies yet. I met some developers at the symposium who worked for companies which prohibited contributing code to open source. As, according to Jonathon Corbet, about 75 percent of the Linux kernel developers are doing their development as part of their job, this is a major issue. Moreover, working hours in some Asian companies tend to be very long for different, mostly “cultural” reasons. That means that the developers’ free time can be very short and does hardly allow them to participate in an open source project. I have also heard of cases in which companies actually claimed ownership for any code a developer produced while working for them. Hence, economy is probably the main reason for the low participation of Asia in open source.

Today the Economist has published a column on Technology in 2008 predicting that Linux will become the operating system of choice in the future:

“No question, Gutsy Gibbon [Ubuntu 7.10] is the sleekest, best integrated and most user-friendly Linux distribution yet. It’s now simpler to set up and configure than Windows. A great deal of work has gone into making the graphics, and especially the fonts, as intuitive and attractive as the Mac’s.

[…]

And because it is free, Linux become the operating system of choice for low-end PCs. It started with Nicholas Negroponte, the brains behind the One Laptop Per Child project that aims to deliver computerised education to children in the developing world. His clever XO laptop, costing less than $200, would never have seen the light of day without its clever (and free) Linux operating system.

[…]

Pundits agree: neither Microsoft nor Apple can compete at the new price points being plumbed by companies looking to cut costs. With open-source software maturing fast, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Evolution, Pidgin and some 23,000 other Linux applications available for free seem more than ready to fill that gap.”