NSF Open SourceResearch Questions

1
NSF - Open Source/Research Questions

• Ben Hyde
• Apache Software Foundation
• Vice President HTTPD Server Project
• bhyde_at_pobox.com
• Intuit
• Business Architect - Innovation Lab
• Ben_Hyde_at_intuit.com
• How important is Open Source?
• Every 6 seconds another active server
• Public good, Huge externalities

2
Four Sides of the Elephant

• Virtuous Cycle
• Source -gt Users -gt Contributions -gt Source
• Network Effect
• Community, How do these arise?
• Public Good
• Non-excludable, non-rival
• Club Good
• Fence around master copy, cell wall, maintains
  quality

3
Open Source - Cycle of Life - Virtuous Cycle
problems
users

• Drivers
• Features
• Low costs,
• Low barriers,
• Diverse incentives

distribution
mirrors, vendors

• Issues
• Agency
• Bottlenecks
• Filtering

contributors
innovations
core team
Sources
4
Virtuous Cycle - Questions

• What systems exist around this cycle?
• Catalog the diversity of approaches
• Encourage Innovative New approaches.
• Understand the barriers and incentives better.
• Number of projects implies chance to experiment.
• Where do we loose users?
• We need numbers, across the board.
• What are the roles at each stage?
• Tool innovation to support those roles.

5
Network Effect

• How do projects survive the transition to strong
  network effects where the community is more of
  the value than the softwares features?
• What is the lifecycle of a project that
  engenders this network effect?
• Particularly how do they get started?
• What of the monopoly risks?
• What are the inter-dependencies between the
  network effects of one project and another?

6
Open Source - A Public Good

• Historically public goods were the role of the
  civic and charitable sector. Is this still true
  for open source?
• Questions - freeloading, overcrowding,
  under-provisioned
• A laboratory for analysis and experiments.
• Information goods are less at risk of the tragedy
  of the commons. True?
• What limits are there on non-excludability?
• What of free-riding, overcrowding, etc?

7
Open Source, a Club Good

• Club Good a public good with a fence around it.
• Helps maintain Quality and Design Center
• What of the risks of agency?
• Questions
• How to engineer the fence?
• The cell membrane good ones make strong vital
  projects.
• Lots of room for innovation here, and much
  experimentation
• How do commercial mimics differ?
• Examples many, amazon book reviews, slashdot