How do culture and open source community interplay?
June 3rd, 2008Robert Lee Hotz in a recent Wall Street Journal article “Revenge of the Freeloaders” summarized a set of fascinating experiments that characterized “antisocial punishment” in cultures around the world. Antisocial punishment is the tendency for individuals to sanction others that behave in a way that benefits society. Prosocial behavior, I had thought, was something that would have been at least tolerated if not universally respected as a noble pursuit. Proves what I know, I guess.
The experiment use groups of four who could contribute to an investment pool anonymously. At the end of the round a dividend would be paid to all. As you can quickly see this is an invitation for freeloaders to withhold their contribution but still reap a benefit. Previous research has evidently proven what we all know to be true… that if there is too much freeloading going contributors will withhold their contributions.
The research indicated that offering the participants the ability to punish those who were freeloaders kept the contributions flowing. The need to punish freeloaders was so essential to the participants that they would punish even if it cost them something to do so.
This triggered some thinking about the relative merits of the BSD and GPL licenses. I’m a fan of both… but given this new observation about the need of those who behave prosocially to chastise freeloaders I have new questions. We know that there really is no practical way for an author who licenses software under the GPL to effectively punish freeloaders. There is no reason to even do so, in fact. Software is meant to be used and it is likely that any author who uses the GPL will in fact desire wide usage of the software in question. Might it be possible, however, that the GPL’s oft derided “viral” aspect assuages contributors internal fears that freeloaders will run rampant without the opportunity to discipline them?
Maybe this explains a recent observation over at the Google Open Source Blog: “The trend around licensing is obvious: GPLv2/GPLv3 represent 42.6% of the projects, and Apache is 25.8%. MIT, BSD, and LGPL are at about 8% each, Artistic at 3.5%, and MPL 1.1 at a mere 2.7%.”
More next time on a compelling and surprising role that cultural attitudes towards prosocial behavior may play in the patterns of open source software development.
Brad
June 6th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
It’s worth clarifying that those percentages represent only those projects hosted by Google using just the subset of open source licenses that Google allows. You’d get different numbers if you looked at the general population of open source projects (and, I suspect, if you did the analysis by lines of code instead simply projects).
June 6th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
True. Open source community metrics are really interesting. It is hard to know if you’ve got a representative survey since the size of the total is unknown. Google Code is clearly a minority sample albeit quickly growing.
This really was never intended as a GPL vs. BSD popularity contest. I’m just fascinated by the idea that our social upbringings by our parents might have… years later… an influence on the kinds of software licenses one finds best.
Thank you for reading and commenting.
June 11th, 2008 at 1:47 am
I’m not entirely sure if I follow your reasoning.
You state that new projects favor the GPL because “humans” want to be able to punish freeloaders.
And then you continue by stating that freeloaders can’t be punished.
I assume you define freeloaders as “people who use the code without contributing changes back”, then. Which is to be expected: if my mom uses Linux, I’m sure she’s not going to contribute any new drivers (however, I got her to work on some translations).
More problematic is when companies change GPL code and don’t contribute back their modifications. This is currently fought by Harald Welte cum suis in Germany against many companies - usually doing SOHO wifi routers and such.
The end result of Harald’s fights: we can now compile our own Linux on some of the devices and get them to run. Support for some very weird chipsets (like the RDC 2311) as used in e.g. http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Sitecom/WL-176 is now mainline kernels. And Sitecom hasn’t sold a single device less because the drivers are free.
This definitely wouldn’t have happened if Linux was BSD code.
Do we need to punish every offender?
Fortunately there aren’t that many (although I know Harald’s team by now can’t keep up with people submitting new violations) and many companies play by the book - e.g. Sony and Philips televisions do have the GPL in the back of their manuals.
But it definitely makes sense to be able to fight/punish - and the effects that the threat by itself already may have.
June 11th, 2008 at 6:30 am
I don’t think that any reasonable person would consider your Mom to be a freeloader. I certainly don’t. I can only assume that anyone writing software under the GPL license intends for it to be used widely.
If the GPL were like the BSD license than Harald’s work interest in propagating the freedoms of those who receive Free software from their device vendors would be a dead end. My theory is that if the GPL were “unenforceable” that a certain class of contributors might redirect their efforts to projects which used “enforceable” licenses.
The BSD is not, of course, a “bad” license in any way. Those who contribute code under the BSD license know its limitations and in fact many of those contributors see these limitations as a benefit.