There is More than Code in Open Source

Today's columnist is Carlo Daffara, the Italian member of the European Working group on libre software. He writes:

Even among researchers, when you talk about “contributions” to open source software you invariably talk about code. Packages, patches, lines of code, whatever: code. In my view, this is quite restrictive, and it is important to start to think about all the possible contributions that are outside of pure code, and how to incent these contributions within projects.

When we think about an open source project, what types of contributions can we find? During a presentation, Aaron Seigo of the KDE project discussed these:

• artwork


• documentation


• human-computer interaction


• marketing


• quality assurance


• software development


• translation

Software development is one of the aspects, but not the only one. After all, if the software is ugly, few people will use it. If it does not work in your language, you may find it less useful, and so on.

Matthias Mueller of the Open Office project published an interesting graph with a similar story. The graph shows the number of active participants in each OpenOffice.org project, with each area proportional to the number of committers. In other words, the larger the area, the more people are active in that area of contribution. The yellow area on the left is related to code, while the coloured part on the right is related to everything else. If you look carefully, you will find that the number of people working on the code aspect is less than the “non-code” part!

In a report published in 2006, one of the project managers of OpenCascade.org (a sophisticated library and toolset designed to create computer aided design (CAD) systems, based on the commercial CAD sold by Matra Datavision) published an interview. Among other things, it stated: “In the year 2000, fifty outside contributors to Open Cascade provided various kinds of assistance: transferring software to other systems (IRIX 64 bits, Alpha OSF), correcting defects (memory leaks…) and translating the tutorial into Spanish, etc. Currently, there are seventy active contributors and the objective is to reach one hundred. These outside contributions are significant. Open Cascade estimates that they represent about 20% of the value of the software.”

The reality is that non-code contributions are significant, and should be encouraged in any possible way. In your open source software project, create a place to help those that are willing to give you more than source code, because that value will get lost if not properly collected. Even small things, like knowing that the code is used by someone, is a positive contribution.

In the next column, I will talk about possible strategies projects can use to improve non-code participation.

March Issue on Mobile Published

The editorial theme for the March issue of the OSBR is Mobile. The guest editors are François Lefebvre from Communications Research Centre, Canada and Thomas Kunz from Carleton University, Ottawa. This month's authors include:

Andreas Constantinou is the Research Director at VisionMobile. His article discusses the importance of governance models to understand the dynamics of an open source product, constrasting it to the better understood role of licences. Using the mobile industry as an example, he demonstrates how governance models can be used by open source sponsors to control the development of open source products, and argues for more education and clarity on governance models.

Jason Kridner is the open platforms principal architect at Texas Instruments Incorporated. His article discusses the challenges and successes in establishing a vibrant ecosystem around the BeagleBoard, a low-cost, fan-less single-board computer. The efforts within this community have allowed the BeagleBoard to become a versatile and powerful open embedded device.

David Burgess of the OpenBTS Project discusses the project's experiences, which will probably become the first case of a free software GSM basestation in a public cellular network. The article focuses on the challenges of the project, as well as the advantages of having followed the open source route.

François Lefebvre leads the Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting team at Communications Research Centre, Canada. His article surveys CRC’s attempt to increase collaboration and innovation in the field of mobile broadcasting by developing and offering complete end-to-end free and open source software toolsets.

Carl B. Dietrich, Jeffrey H. Reed, Stephen H. Edwards and Frank E. Kragh discuss OSSIE, a university-based open source Software Defined Radio project at Virginia Tech. OSSIE software has proven useful for rapid prototyping by industry as well as for published research and education of hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students. In addition to examples of OSSIE’s successes, the project’s challenges and approaches to mitigating and overcoming them are described.

Hal Steger, Vice President of Marketing at Funambol, inc., introduces the cloud computing paradigm as a way to deliver mobile applications and data. His article discusses trends that are driving the adoption of the mobile cloud, important components of mobile cloud infrastructure, and the role of open source.

Bradley M. Kuhn is the Policy Analyst and Technology Director at the Software Freedom Law Center. He briefly reviews the history of free software in the mobile device space, focusing on both software and hardware. A review of the available alternatives to-date leads him to conclude that users, while able to access open code bases from major companies, are at the mercy of these companies. For a number of reasons, true software freedom on mobile devices is, as yet, an elusive goal.