Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [119]
Chapter 4. Patterns of Online Collaboration
p 44: Insightful accounts of open source software development include [12, 13, 178, 235]. Even more useful are the innumerable open source projects maintained online at sites such as GitHub (http://github.com) and SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net).
p 44: My history of Linux is based largely on postings to the comp.os.minix, alt.os.linux, and comp.os.linux newsgroups in 1991 and 1992. I found reading through those forums surprisingly enjoyable, and even compelling: as you read, you start to get a visceral sense of what was involved in producing a marvel of modern software. My account of Linux was also broadly influenced by [235], as well as many other sources for details (see below).
p 45 Shortly after Torvalds’s post . . . : comp.os.minix newsgroup posting, January 13, 1992.
p 45 80 people were named as contributors in the Linux Credits file: See [226] for the history of the Credits file. March 1994 is the first time such a file was included in Linux.
p 45 By early 2008, the Linux kernel . . . : [114].
p 45: On the role of Linux in Hollywood animation and visual effects companies, see [90] for an account as of 2002, the time when Linux was coming into the industry, and beginning to dominate. [187] claims that as of 2008, Linux was used on “more than 95% of the servers and desktops at large animation and visual effects companies.”
p 45 Open source software projects have two key attributes: Some open source advocates prefer a more nuanced description of open source than the description I’ve given. Many complex and sometimes heated discussions have gone on regarding which projects should be regarded as truly open source. Indeed, a not-for-profit organization named the Open Source Initiative exists in part to decide whether a project should be labeled open source, and if so, to provide certification. From the outside this may look like pedantic nitpicking, but there are good reasons for it. Open source is sometimes seen as a threat to some large software companies: for instance, Linus Torvalds once said in the New York Times, “I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect” [52]. Some of the companies threatened by open source have struck back by trying to break the open source brand, releasing products they call “open source,” but lacking crucial features found in truly open source projects. In May 2001, Microsoft senior vice president Craig Mundie [142] announced that Microsoft would be releasing some products as “Shared Source,” stating that “Shared Source is Open Source.” A close look at the Microsoft Shared Source licenses shows that they are heavily skewed toward users of Microsoft products, and in some cases prevent programmers from modifying code. This is certainly not open source! That type of incident shows why open source advocates sometimes get upset when people use the term “open source” in a sloppy way. We’ll take a more relaxed approach that I believe gets at the essence of open source, but without getting bogged down in the complexities of whether the projects we describe would pass all the stringent tests demanded by some open source advocates.
p 46: The figure of 4,300 lines of code added to the Linux kernel per day is from an informative talk about the Linux kernel development process, by Greg Kroah-Hartman [113].
p 46 an experienced developer will typically write a f: for insousand lines of code per year: this estimate is based on the COCOMO II software model [19].
p 46 SourceForge is home to more than 230,000 open source projects: [239].
p 46 open source is a general design methodology that can be applied to any project involving digital information: The open source methodology can also be applied to nondigital information. You could imagine, for instance, using architects’ printed plans as the basis for open source design of buildings. The problem with analog information is that it