FACIL: actively promoting Open Source in Québec

I found a not-for-profit organization actively promoting free software in Québec: FACIL. They filed a motion against the government for not considering open source software for their workstation. They state that the migration to open source software would produce significant saving for the government and will also help Québec IT sectors to develop. Currently the government is sending millions to multinational corporation (mainly Microsoft) for products license. Those contracts are attributed without any invitation to tender, which is not in accordance to the regulation. FACIL intend to force the government into a more open and transparent procedure for contract attribution.

This is a really interesting case of F/OSS community actively contesting closed source monopoly. I did join up as a member, it cost 20$ and it helps to finance the lawsuit against the government.

You can read all about it here:

Montreal, August 28th 2008 - FACIL, a non-profit association, which promotes the collective appropriation of Free Software, contests the Quebec government purchasing methods for software used within public administrations. FACIL has filed a motion before the Quebec Superior Court in order to bring an end to these methods which the association believes not to be in the best interest of the Quebec government, but more importantly, not in accordance with the regulation for supply contracts, construction contracts and service contracts of government departments and public bodies (R.Q. c. A-6.01, r.0.03).

In Quebec, access to public markets is the rule while contracts attribution without invitation to tender is the exception. A public market should be transparent, fair and most importantly, open to all. The solutions as well as the propositions must be evaluated objectively on known and accepted criteria. Furthermore, the regulation implies that public markets have to enhance the local economic development as well as the Quebec technologies.

From February to June 2008, FACIL has noticed sales of proprietary software for more than 25 million dollars. These purchases were made for products offered by large multinational enterprises, with no regard to suppliers in Quebec. These purchases hurt the Free Software suppliers throughout Quebec and are an obstacle to the development of Quebec IT enterprises. FACIL contests these methods as the association believes they are illegal and unacceptable.

A strategic Free Software utilization in public administration could create thousands of jobs as well as a significant decrease in software licensing costs. However, Quebec's public administration refuses to even consider and evaluate these options.

While most of the developed countries have started, a few years back, migrating their technological infrastructures to Free Software, Quebec's public administration is far behind. In France, hundreds of thousands of desktops used by civil servants have been migrated. In the Netherlands, the public administration, one of the most modern in the world, has made open formats mandatory within the public administration, as well as a set of mesures to consider Free Software alongside proprietary software, and where possible to prefer Free Software.

But here in Quebec, despite numerous initiatives, the public administration refuses to communicate and to cooperate. FACIL has decided to bring the matter to court in order for the public market law to be respected.

Crisis: defining itself

Wow, lots went on in the last few days. The list that had a one or two messages per day went to more than a dozen everyday.

A political debate got really hot and personal between certain persons. The moderator had to step in, and it didn't really help the problem. Few persons left the list, new forums emerged and all this fuzz lead to a redefinition of the role of the list. Should it be used only for general discussion? Should the support aspect be moved elsewhere? Should there be new list for different type of discussion? Those are questions that are still debate. The increase of participant lately made the administrator request new moderators to join in, and the community is asking for more clarity.

What I've learn about this is that the place of the political discussion on my discussion list is taking new proportion lately and it is now requesting its own space.

And here goes anonymity...

Taken from: Raymond, Eric S. 2001. How To Become A Hacker. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html.

Finally, a few things not to do.

• Don't use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name. 

[...]

The only reputation you'll make doing any of these things is as a twit. Hackers have long memories — it could take you years to live your early blunders down enough to be accepted.

The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser.

Hacker and Community, part 2/2: Defining Community

Writing about community reveals to be far more complicate than I firstly anticipated, maybe because I am trying to bit off more than what I can chew. I tried so far to enlace too many people in what I considered to be the F/OSS community. On one side, you have multiple “hackers’” community revolving around various projects, and on the other, you have users taking the most out of the system. They do share common goals: adapt the system to fit their needs. On the other hand, their practices to do so are completely different.

There is also the question of “space”. Do they share the same locus? Yes and no. Some platform and website are dedicated to development, while other are oriented for support and community chat. It is not rare to see “hacker” engaging himself on support and community forum and discussion list. After all, “hackers” are also users. On the other side, the open source nature of the various project make it easy for users to participate in various development task, e.g. doing translation. Hence the borders between those spaces are blurred by the flow of individual that goes from one to the other. Thus, “locus” can hardly be taken as criteria to delimit communities boundaries.

One of the interesting reading I made refer to Ubuntu hackers as a community of practice. Andreas Lloyd’s approach is very relevant. Here’s a big chunk of his thesis:

“In examining the Ubuntu hackers' day­to­day practices, I argue that the Ubuntu hackers’ shared use and development of the Ubuntu system constitutes a community of practice around their collaborative work and commitment to the project. By positing the Ubuntu community as a community of practice, I explore how the Ubuntu hackers are using new technical and social means to manage and share knowledge and skills on­line, and how these means of learning and sharing are reflected in the system itself. 

I argue that though the Ubuntu community offers complete access to every technical detail of the transparent system they develop, the social boundaries of this on­line community are defined through the active use and development of the system itself. Because of this, membership and participation in this community is gained through a shared history of learning the specialized knowledge and social norms this use and development requires, making the group of developers a meritocratic group joined only through dedicated collaborative work. Thus, despite the Ubuntu system solely consisting of free software, the freedom it offers can only be fully appreciated by hackers capable of developing it. For this group of hackers, the Ubuntu system is the all­encompassing means offering them the freedom to fulfil their diverse personal, social motivations for contributing to the system. By building a system that works for each of them individually, the Ubuntu hackers come to construct a system which reflects their practices. But they also seek to ensure that the Ubuntu system, as well as the community of practice through which it is built, is open to all, depending on the users’ willingness to invest the time and effort to scale the steep curve of learning necessary to adopt, learn, configure, and even build the system according to their own needs, and master the core practices and social norms required for membership. 

I argue that this shared practice and history of learning to collaboratively build and maintain the Ubuntu system results in a careful mutual trust in the hackers’ complementary abilities through which the integrity and solidity of the intricately complex Ubuntu system is guaranteed, and which the many users of the Ubuntu system come to rely on. And similarly, it is through this reciprocal trust that the diversity of motivations and conflicting interests within the community of practice is managed under the reciprocal big­man leadership and ethos of a few prominent and respected core Ubuntu developers.” (Lloyd, 2007 : 10-11)

While it covers well the hackers’ uses of Ubuntu, I feel it won’t suffice for my needs. In order to look at software as contestation tools against copyright, authorship and intellectual property, the concept of community of practice might be short of use. Some authors (Szczepanska et al., 2007) approach the community identity's question using a foucaultian analyze of discourse. They argue that discours provide understanding on how collective identity is created and communicated. 

“Developing discourses is vital for providing the members of the [open source] movement with a meaningful context that enables creative software development activities across organizational and geographical boundaries. People feel a bond with others not because they share the same interest, but because they need that bond in order to make sense of what they are doing. Discourses […] enable members of a community to affirm themselves as subjects of their action and parts of a collective action.” (Szczepanska et al., 2007: 433)

Contestation discourse might reveal lots of information on the community’s nature and the bonds that tie them. I expect contestation to be a pivotal element to define open source movement as a whole. In this sense, it might also tie together different members, users and hackers, in the same community.

References: 

• Andreas, Lloyd. 2007. A System that Works for me: an anthropological analysis of computer hacker' shared use and development of the Ubuntu Linux system. Master's thesis, University of Copenhagen. Available here.
  
• Szczepanska, Anna Maria, Magnus Bergquist, and Jan Ljungberg. 2007. High Noon at OS Corral: Duels and Shoot-Outs in Open Source Discourse. In Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, ed. Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. Hissam, and Karim R. Lakhani. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
  

Participant observation as a method

After some scouting on the Ubuntu forums, I've come to the point were participant observation need to kick in. I've located a working team that I will try to join as a regular member, and I will participate as much as I can in the free / open source projects. For ethical reason, I'll notify the group leader of my researcher's status. On another part, I will comply with their norm and behavior as much as it is possible for me. There are various requirements to join the team that I'll try to fill out. The inclusion process in itself will probably provide lots of information on what defined this group. This part will be my main objective for now and once inside the group, I'll see how I can contribute, and at the same time I hope to get a better understanding of the community..

On a different note, language is a key component in understanding how a community think and work. So last weekend, in a spontaneous excess of motivation, I've started learning a programming language. This experience is completely new to me, but already, I've learned many things about the community through this learning process. 

For someone who has never programs before, learning a code language involve more than reading a manual. You need to choose out a language to learn (oh yes, there's more than one!), why this one is relevant for the F / OSS community, you need to look for advice, for new module to include in your program and so on. When I made this decision, I hadn't realized how relevant this might be. Even if the main focus on this project will not be on programming language, I think the process of learning a language may provide insightful information. 

In sums, I start my investigation with those two paths: 

1- Getting accepted in a working group.

2- Learning coding language

The objectives in themselves are not relevant, the process is.

List of questions

Back to the main purpose of this blog, I’ll list here the key questions and the focus I want to give to this project. Don’t expect those questions to be static and decisive. For now, they are simple milestone to guide this investigation.

The main objective of this research consists of understanding the free / open source community’s perception and use of software as a contestation tools against copyright, authorship and intellectual property. This question contain multiple parts:

1- Do the community perceives the F/OSS as contestation tools? By contestation tools, I mean a way to criticize and to pressurize the traditional software corporation and their ideology.

1.1- To achieve this task, I’ll need to understand and summarize what is the ideology behind proprietary software, and what about it pose problem to the F/OSS community.

2- If they do perceive the F/OSS as a contestation tools, how can they act accordingly? What action can they make to challenge the ideology that they stand up against? How do they use those tools?

2.1- What is the place of software as a mean of contestation?

2.2- What is the role of the community versus of the role of individual in this contestation?

This small collection of questions will guide my first step in the community. New questions may arise as I progress, while other may be left out. Nonetheless, it feel like a good base to start on.

Choice - F/OSS Community

Finally, I am fixed on one subject. Sadly, to choose one, is to let go many others. I guess I can't help it. If anyone of you is desperate to find an idea, I could provide a few ones. Maybe a dozen...

* * *

I will focus my ethnography on the free/open source community. Briefly stated, free/open source community is a grouping of developers and users of free/open source software (F/OSS). The particularity of such software is that they are distributed under terms that allow a user to use freely (as in free speech) his software.

The concept of freedom with computer software can be hard to grasp at first. To illustrate it, here's what I can read at the back of my Ubuntu CD, an open source operating system based on Linux:

"You are encouraged and legally entitled to copy, reinstall, modify, and redistribute this CD for yourself and your friends."

The focus point here is the community behind those software. These people, situated everywhere in the "meat world" regroup themselves on internet to work over project that they share with the rest of the world. This ideology contrasted with the mainstream business model of large software corporation such as Microsoft. Moreover, many members of this community see more in this movement than software development. Many see a way of life, a fight against propriety software, copyright holder and such. I want those members of the open source community to be at the center of my ethnographic project.

Open Source Ad on Youtube

The F/OSS community may be reach in a vast array of locations. For the purpose of this ethnography, I will start with the community section of the Ubuntu forums. Those forums were set up by community members that wanted to support fellow ubuntu users, and help each other improving their ubuntu experience. I chose this forum in particular for three reasons. I will then extend the research to the IRC chat room associate with this part of the forum.

1- As an ubuntu user, I am already familiar with other part of the forum (mainly the support part) where I asked for help and shared my little knowledge on the matter. I can't say that I am a very active member, I made a little over 100 posts over the past 3 years and my friend list is still empty.

2- The ubuntu forums in general are well regarded in the open source community. The members take pride in their openness and are really helpful. Harsh response to question such as "RTFM" (Read the Fucking Manuel) or "Google it" are frown upon, and most of the time, author of such comment get moderated.

3- I am not a programmer, nor a developer, let alone a hacker. I have absolutely no knowledge in the matter. On the other hand, I know that I will still have a place to participate in this community because of their respect for others and for their openness.