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National Science Foundation Says Open Source Can Be Cheaper, Better, Faster

Tuesday, December 16 2003 @ 05:31 AM EST

"Open-source can be faster, better and cheaper than closed corporate software development, say researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and the National Science Foundation." So begins the article, "Scientific Research Backs Wisdom of Open Source", on Newsfactor. They're studying the open source method, and they like it, particularly for large software systems.

The program director for NSF reports:

"'The software-intensive systems in today’s world have become so complex that we need every available design tool at our disposal,' said Suzanne Iacono, NSF program director. 'Open-source development has achieved some remarkable successes, and we need to learn from these successes as our systems become increasingly distributed, complex and heterogeneous. Traditional software engineering methods were originally developed for single-system design and development.'”

You can read the National Science Foundation's press release which quotes Principal Investigator Walt Scacchi as saying this:

“'In many ways, open-source development projects are treasure troves of information for how large software systems get developed in the wild, if you will,' Scacchi said.

"Open-source project databases, for example, record hundreds of thousands of bug reports. Gasser and Scacchi are mining those databases to try to understand how bug reporting relates to software quality or if it has other implications. 'These are unprecedented data sets in software engineering research,' he said. 'We’re thinking of these databases in a ‘national treasure’ sense. We’re never going to get this from a corporate source.'

"Open-source is not a poor version of software engineering, but a private-collective approach to large-software systems,” Scacchi said. “This is perhaps a new fertile ground between software engineering and the world of open-source and may be what the open-source community can contribute to new academic and commercial development efforts.”

You can read the series of reports here and here. And here is one by Mr. Scacchi on free software. That's free as in freedom. The University of CA describes its research like this:

"UCI research in open source software development focuses on empirically-based studies of the processes, practices, and communities that develop open source software."

IBM says on top of all that, Linux is fun:

"Why is IBM supporting Linux?

"Because we admire it, we believe in it, we need it and it's good for customers. And, well...it's a lot of fun."

They have some penguin videos there too, if you're in the mood. And a picture of Linus and a penguin cake. IBM also has, in the developers section, some very helpful articles on making the transition from Windows to Linux. Here is Part 1, Thinking in Linux by Chis Walden. I'm not a developer, but I could understand it and enjoy it.

Here's the complete NSF press release, except for the contact information:

************************************************************

Faster, Better, Cheaper: Open-Source Practices May Help Improve Software Engineering

ARLINGTON, Va.—Walt Scacchi of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues are conducting formal studies of the informal world of open-source software development, in which a distributed community of developers produces software source code that is freely available to share, study, modify and redistribute. They’re finding that, in many ways, open-source development can be faster, better and cheaper than the “textbook” software engineering often used in corporate settings.

In a series of reports posted online (see www.isr.uci.edu), Scacchi is documenting how open-source development breaks many of the software engineering rules formulated during 30 years of academic research. Far from finding that open-source development is just software engineering poorly done, Scacchi and colleagues show that it represents a new approach based on community building and other socio-technical mechanisms that might benefit traditional software engineering.

“Free and open-source software development is faster, better and cheaper in building a community and at reinforcing and institutionalizing a culture for how to develop software,” said Scacchi, a senior research scientist at UC Irvine’s Institute for Software Research who has taught software engineering for two decades. “We’re not ready to assert that open-source development is the be-all end-all for software engineering practice, but there’s something going on in open-source development that is different from what we see in the textbooks.”

Scacchi and his colleagues are studying open-source projects to understand when the processes and practices work and when they don’t. These findings may help businesses understand the implications of adopting open-source methods internally or investing in external open-source communities. The studies are supported by several Information Technology Research awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.

Three projects—one by Les Gasser at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Scacchi, one by Scacchi and John Noll of Santa Clara University and one led by UC Irvine’s Richard Taylor—are applying the lessons learned from open-source practices to create new design, process-management and knowledge-management tools for large-scale, multi-organization development projects.

“In many ways, open-source development projects are treasure troves of information for how large software systems get developed in the wild, if you will,” Scacchi said.

Open-source project databases, for example, record hundreds of thousands of bug reports. Gasser and Scacchi are mining those databases to try to understand how bug reporting relates to software quality or if it has other implications. “These are unprecedented data sets in software engineering research,” he said. “We’re thinking of these databases in a ‘national treasure’ sense. We’re never going to get this from a corporate source.”

Not all open-source projects are alike, however. A small number of open-source projects have become well known, but the vast majority never get off the ground, according to Scacchi. He and his colleagues are trying to understand how successful projects, such as the Linux Kernel, grow from a few individuals to a community of a thousand developers.

Similarly, they are trying to determine whether or not open-source software is appropriate for complex, fixed-requirements projects of interest only to a limited community (for example, air defense radar software). It is unclear whether such systems can or will ever be developed in an open manner, or whether open-source approaches would falter, while traditional software engineering approaches would succeed.

To explore the breadth of open-source activity, Scacchi and colleagues are looking at more than a hundred projects in several categories: network games, Internet and Web infrastructure, academic and scientific software and industry-sponsored activities.

The network games include PlaneShift, Crystal Space, and game “mods” for Epic Games’ Unreal or id Software’s Quake game engines. Internet and Web infrastructure projects range from Linux Kernel, Apache and Mozilla to GNU Enterprise. In another project, Mark Ackerman at the University of Michigan and Scacchi are examining how scientists working in fields like X-ray astronomy and deep-space imaging are using open-source software to support basic scientific research. More recent efforts are examining industry-sponsored open-source projects including NetBeans from Sun Microsystems and Eclipse from IBM.

“The software-intensive systems in today’s world have become so complex that we need every available design tool at our disposal,” said Suzanne Iacono, NSF program director. “Open-source development has achieved some remarkable successes, and we need to learn from these successes as our systems become increasingly distributed, complex and heterogeneous. Traditional software engineering methods were originally developed for single-system design and development.”

The researchers have so far identified a number of ways in which open-source development surpasses traditional software engineering. In successful projects, open-source development is faster in the pace of evolution and the rate of software growth. Expertise also spreads faster through the community.

The researchers also report that open-source development is better because of, among other features, its informality, which enables continuous system design and more agile development processes. And open-source is cheaper because the development tools are often open-source themselves and because other costs are often subsidized by corporate donations, volunteer efforts and “gifts” for the collective good.

“Open-source is not a poor version of software engineering, but a private-collective approach to large-software systems,” Scacchi said. “This is perhaps a new fertile ground between software engineering and the world of open-source and may be what the open-source community can contribute to new academic and commercial development efforts.”

ISR Open-Source Software Development Research at UC Irvine: http://www.isr.uci.edu/research-open-source.html

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of nearly $5.3 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 30,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes about 10,000 new funding awards. The NSF also awards over $200 million in professional and service contracts yearly.

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Free Software Legal Protection

Authored by: tcranbrook on Tuesday, December 16 2003 @ 08:08 AM EST

This article, Free Software Legal Protection, proposes draft legislation to protect the use of the several FLOSS license.

"Free software is no longer a product or resource solely of hackerdom. It has spread its tentacles and other parts throughout the world, so that its use, deployment and promotion are being considered in every continent on the planet. Relying on a common law concept of software protection is not totally satisfactory, and not only from the legality of the licenses in question. Before the introduction of copyright to cover software, a sui generis regime had been considered in a number of jurisdictions around the globe. Such plans were abandoned in the face of US trade threats for non-compliance with its prescribed law. In fact, the free licensing system has become a sui generis protection all of its own, and as a system that has functioned effectively for a considerable period of time, this deserves legislative recognition as a form of customary law crying out for codification. If legislation fails to reflect the will of the people, legislators lose their mandate to tell us what to do."