Rudy Godoy :: an act of subversive playful cleverness

For some time ago I’ve been pondering about this question. As long as GSoC 2009 is about to start and people are looking for project ideas, I’m posting here a very preliminar draft of my findings and an idea for a posible software project. It’s pretty written on-the-fly while I’ve managed to have some minutes between work and uni. Rigurous wording isn’t P1.

Debian’s social contract 4th item states:

Our priorities are our users and free software We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities.

When we make decisions, either technical, legal and others regarding the operating system we deliver, this is one of the most referred argument. Altough that’s seen as high priority often we don’t have ways to properly know what our users want. While working on translations on the Spanish team we’ve faced this situation. Do our users find them useful? they are able to understand them? they find that a much familiar wording would be bette than high technical details? We didn’t know. Then, the question still exists.

Altough Debian has ways for users to provide feedback (BTS, mailing lists, IRC,  popcon, etc) none of them is designed to offer a way for the user to provide feedback on features, development roadmap and other non-bug aspects that developers and the project can tally and use for prioritize on releases. It’s rather amusing to note that one of the most valuable assets free software community has is user involvement and contribution.

But before we enter in details let’s start on the basics. For using this information we first need to know who our users are? do we? From my findings and interaction with the community I’ve identified two kinds of Debian users who can be clearly named.

1) The derivatives or pure blends, who use the Debian base and framework to build niche distributions.

2) The lead users (using E. Von Hippel’s definition), who are the developers, contributors and a group of users. Debian is, if not the only, one of the projects who is best for fostering lead users. Most of them at some point involve themselves in the development process and some, later become developers.

There is a more diverse group who are end-users but it’s unclear to me how we can group them. Despite that they probably represent the biggest part of the pie.

So, how we do please everyone? can we? In my opinion we can, at some degree. By implementing tools for first: gather user feedback, make statistical data, tally, we later can take informed decisions. In Debian decisions are voted and the set of people who votes are only developers with their own constraints.

I think this would ease the constant that release-decisions-regarding-foo-tech-legal-issue represented on each release iteration, saving time, health and bits.  It could be useful for knowing more about who are the ones we develop things for. I’m thinking of some sort of Dell’s IdeaStorm.com for software.

What do you think? I’m willing to co-mentor this if someone finds that is an interesting project for GSoC. Let me know!.

El software libre, desde sus inicios, ha tenido un estrecho vínculo con la academia. Proyectos como GNU, FreeBSD, Linux, se han gestado en los claustros de conocidas universidades, por sus estudiantes. Hoy en día, una buena parte del software libre, que podemos encontrar en sitios como freshmeat.net, es desarrollado dentro de entornos académicos. Toda esta producción inicial se ha realizado en un entorno pre-ecosistema de software libre, en el que, además del software, también se construyeron las bases de la cultura y prácticas adoptadas por la comunidad.

Hoy, el desarrollo que ha alcanzado el ecosistema de software libre ha permitido que cada vez más organizaciones, empresas, e instituciones adopten las soluciones de software creadas por éste. Por un lado, estudios recientes, como los de Gartner, señalan que para el 2012 gran parte de los productos comerciales de software emplearán componentes de software libre y que por lo menos una tercera parte del presupuesto de las empresas para software de aplicación se destinará a servicios de suscripción.

IDC said “Open Source is the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980’s.”

Gartner predict that “ By 2012, 80 per cent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology. ”

A survey of nearly 1000 IT staff in the UK, Germany, France and North America, commissioned by Actuate, showed that fifty four percent of businesses in the UK felt that the benefits of open source outweighed any negative aspects

Another Gartners top predictions for 2008 is that “by 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as a service subscription instead of as a product licence”.

Por otro lado, esto también presenta una situación en la que la demanda de profesionales con conocimiento de tecnologías de software libre se incrementa, mientras que la oferta parece ser cada vez más escasa, según demuestran estudios de Actuate.

Research conducted for Actuate found that six in every ten respondents said there “were serious problems finding the right IT skills to implement and manage open source solutions”

El pasado sábado 22, tuve la oportunidad de ofrecer una charla en mi universidad, la UPC, en la que desarrolle estos temas. El enfoque tenia como objetivo el saber cómo aprovechar, inteligentemente, como estudiantes de computación, las oportunidades y recursos que existen hoy para desarrollarnos profesionalmente haciendo lo que nos apasiona: software libre. En este sentido, conversamos acerca del programa Google Summer of Code como una manera de avanzar hacia tal objetivo, por los beneficios que ofrece a nivel académico y profesional. Además, presenté el proyecto OSS Watch, cuyo objetivo es fortalecer el vínculo entre la comunidad académica y la de software libre a través del desarrollo de material académico que introduzca prácticas de desarrollo de la comunidad en los cursos de computación. A través de esto el proyecto busca mejorar las capacidades de los futuros profesionales que les permitan desarrollar soluciones basadas en tecnologías de software libre.

La charla estuvo organizada por el grupo GNU UPC, conformado por alumnos y ex-alumnos de la universidad, que está en un proceso de reactivación de actividades y retomando proyectos a futuro, de los cuales seguro tendré algún grado de culpa. Las diapositivas de mi presentación están en el wiki que he creado para publicar mis trabajos academicos y proyectos personales.