The Software Commons — Production, risks, and opportunities

The Software Commons — Production, risks, and opportunities Stefano Zacchiroli Télécom Paris, Polytechnic Institute of Paris [email protected] 23 June 2022 The Materiality of Intangible Goods Jena, Germany THE GREAT LIBRARY OF SOURCE CODE Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 1 / 14 Outline 1Preface 2The Software Commons 3Avoiding the Tragedy of the Unmaintained Software Commons 4Opportunities 5Outlook Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 2 / 14 About the speaker Professor of Computer Science, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris Free/Open Source Software activist (20+ years) Debian Developer & Former 3x Debian Project Leader Former Open Source Initiative (OSI) director Software Heritage co-founder & CTO Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 2 / 14 Software is everywhere (and a key mediator) in society Software Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 3 / 14 Outline 1Preface 2The Software Commons 3Avoiding the Tragedy of the Unmaintained Software Commons 4Opportunities 5Outlook Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 4 / 14 The Commons and FOSS Definition (Commons) The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. Definition (Software Commons) The software commons consists of all computer software which is available at little or no cost and which can be altered and reused with few restrictions. Thus all open source software and all free software are part of the [software] commons. [...] Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 4 / 14 Software source code is precious human knowledge Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1st ed.) 1985 “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” Apollo 11 source code (excerpt)Quake III source code ( excerpt ) Len Shustek, Computer History Museum 2006 “Source code provides a view into the mind of the designer.” Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 5 / 14 But where is this commons? many disparate development platforms, with a few dominant players (e.g., GitHub) a myriad places where distribution may happen most of them operated by for-profit companies Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 6 / 14 Software source code is fragile Like all digital information, FOSS is fragile link rot: projects are created, moved around, removed business-driven code loss (e.g., Gitorious, Google Code, Bitbucket) data rot: physical media with legacy software decay If a website disappears you go to the Internet Archive... where do you go if (a repository on) GitHub or GitLab goes away? Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 7 / 14 The Software Commons is growing fast and becoming more diverse An observatory on the Software Commons enables studying broad phenomena and trends. Original content released as public code doubles every 22-30 months (Di Cosmo, Rousseau, Zacchiroli. Emp.Sw.Eng. 2020). Other examples: long-term population trends such as gender diversity (Zacchiroli, IEEE Software 2021) and geography diversity (Rossi and Zacchiroli. ICSE & MSR 2022) in public code. Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 12 / 14 Who produces Free/Open Source Software? Historically, a community of hobbyists motivated by liberating computer users Today: the above + independent professionals + a lot of for-profit companies, producing FOSS they control in various ways (licensing, governance, etc.) But what is the ratio? We lack comprehensive overviews of the landscape. Challenges: Size What do you measure? (projects? SLOCs? popularity?) Free riding is not always visible How much exploitation (of labor) and appropriation (of value) is happening? Mathieu O’Neil, Xiaolan Cai, Laure Muselli, Fred Pailler, Stefano Zacchiroli The Coproduction of Open Source Software by Volunteers and Big Tech Firms Digital Commons Policy Council, 2021. Mathieu O’Neil, Laure Muselli, Xiaolan Cai, Stefano Zacchiroli Co-producing industrial public goods on GitHub: Selective firm cooperation, volunteer-employee labour and participation inequality New Media & Society, April 2022. Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 13 / 14 Outline 1Preface 2The Software Commons 3Avoiding the Tragedy of the Unmaintained Software Commons 4Opportunities 5Outlook Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 14 / 14 Outlook Takeaways Collectively, free/open source software developers are building a novel form of digital commons: the software commons. It benefits society as a library of technical knowledge and is exploited by for-profit companies as an industrial public good. The risk of losing access to it should be countered with individual care, public policies, and proactive initiatives. Open questions / discussion leads Who is producing the software commons? (volunteers/employees/civil servants/...) Who is benefiting the most from the software commons? Do we need different public policies and/or licensing strategies to fix any of this? What other risks is the software commons facing? Stefano Zacchiroli The Software Commons 2022-06-23, Jena 14 / 14