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The Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Support System

Introduction

The support system of FLOSS communities is as perfect as it is erroneous. On the one hand it offers a 24hours, 7 days a week, 365 days per year support with up to date content (learning materials), and all of this provided by volunteers at no charge. On the other hand it is erroneous since none of these services are granted and consequently there might be less support at the individual level and some learner might end up without help.

Main Part

Lakhani and von Hippel (2003) analysed the support system of the Apache community and found that their field support systems functions effectively and that 98% of the support services return direct learning benefits for the support provider. They confirmed that ‘giving as a natural thing’ as also described by Demaziere (2006), or ‘gaining reputation’ and ‘personal enjoyment’ are important motivational factors, but so are the ‘learning benefits’ for the support provider.

The information provider learns himself by providing support. He might learn about processes that could be improved, features that might be re-designed or newly introduced, where the support needs to be improved, or just on a personal level on how he could improve doing things. Thus the situation between the information provider and receiver could be described as a win / win situation.

The fact that a great part of motivation to provide volunteering support resides in learning benefits for the support provider leads also to the conclusion that there need to be problems in order to keep the support system alive – or as Lakhani and von Hippel expressed it with a quote of Raymond:

"Actually . . . the list [of fetchmail beta-testers] is beginning to lose members from its high of close to 300 for an interesting reason. Several people haveasked me to unsubscribe them because fetchmail isworking so well for them that they no longer needto see the list traffic! Perhaps this is part of thenormal life-cycle of a mature, bazaar-style project.”(Raymond, 1999, pp. 46–47).

Support in FLOSS is characterized by “information seekers posting their questions on a public website. Potential information providers log onto this website, read the questions and post answers if and as they choose to do so.” (Lakhani & von Hippel 2003) In FLOSS it is expected that the information seeker first try to solve their problem themselves by the means of available materials and if required by surfing the web.

For the case of Apache it might be interesting to note that the core development team made clear that they are not interested in providing any support and therefore the support system has evolved separately, operated by and for users themselves.

Hence the joining of new members (newcomers) is extremely important in order to maintain the sustainability of FLOSS projects this, in turn, increases complexity, since these newcomers have to be (culturally) integrated and taught in order to help them to become competent members, by avoiding the possible limits of the FLOSS support model as outlined above by Lakhani and von Hippel.

The FLOSS support model could not be sustained if it would solely rest on the hands of experts or developers, as they constitute the community’s most valuable source of innovation and new software development. Furthermore, “experts may lack patience to guide a novice, and, from the novice’s viewpoint, someone more proximate in experience may be a better teacher than the expert because the knowledge gap is not as great” (Swap et al, 2001). Therefore, other community members who are already advanced learners are also contributing to the support, e.g. by answering forum posts.

For the newcomer, the first learning steps are the most difficult, as they do not know what questions to ask or where to start. So, many experts strongly recommend first reading other’s code or. the software manual.

As already stated the community usually doesn’t provide support for things that could be easily solved through self-study, reading the frequently asked questions (FAQ) and other provided materials, or by searching the web. By ignoring those rules newcomers are likely to be confronted with the probably most used abbreviations in FLOSS, the RTFM (‘Read The Friendly Manual’) and the STFW (‘Search The Friendly Web’, also known as ‘Google is your friend’).

An illustration of an ‘ignorance newbie entry’ (Hemetsberger, 2006), is following provided:

Newcomer:

Hello Everyone,

I am totally new to KDevelop, please let me know what it is, when I saw it for the first time I found it as if it is for developing new applications for KDE ...

Please tell me how to start with KDevelop ... if I want to develop some Applications like what we do with visual basic on Windows platform then what is the best (Let me know whether I can do something with QT Designer for Developing Applications to run on Linux ...)

Anyone please help me in this regard ... I am very much interested to develop GUI applications for Linux ...

Thanks & Regards

Expert:

Maybe you want to wait for Visual Basic for Linux? Perhaps it is available in about 50 years. Since you are new to Linux I can give you the astonishing advice to read the documents which come with your system or are available at http://www.kde.org/. I do not believe that someone here has the time to write the documentation especially for you.

I do not know where you come from. Perhaps you are used to Win systems. Obviously new users there get a short introduction to system and all software packages by Bill himself.

You can believe me that I do not expect this mail to help you, but I could not resist.

Sorry!

However, when a newcomer shows that he has some degree of knowledge on the subject and that he has tried to solve a question himself than the community is receptive to provide support. The following excerpt, taken from the Apache Usenet (Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003), presents an example of this.

Newcomer

Subject: Apache 1.3.1 and FrontPage 98 extensions.

A small problem . . .

Hi,

I’ve compiled and installed Apache 1.3.1 with mod frontpage.c. That section seems to be working. I have installed the FrontPage 98 extensions, and that seems to almost be working, but I can’t find any relevant information anywhere about how to solve this problem. I can look at a home page for a user, but I can’t publish to it. Whenever Front-

Page tries to connect to the server, this message appears in the error logs:

Thu Oct 8 10: 13:31 1998 [error] (104) Connection reset by peer: Incorrect permissions on webroot “/usr/local/httpd/htdocs/_vti_pvt” and webroot’s _vti_pvt directory in FrontPageAlias().

Thu Oct 8 10: 13:31 1998 [error] File does not exist: /usr/local/httpd/htdocs/vti_bin/shtml.exe/_vti_rpc

I haven’t a clue how to fix it. Any help will be very appreciated, and a reply by e-mail will be noticed more quickly (I’m terrible at remembering to check the newsgroups)

Thanks!

Expert

Hi there,

There are two possible causes of your problem:

1. Make sure owner and group are the same and that the directories have the same set of permissions. /home/user/public_html user group/home/user/public_html/_ vit_ bin www group1 should be: /home/user/public_ html user group/public_html/_ vit_bin user group

2. Apache-fp utilizes fpexe and mod frontpage to provide a higher level of security. Part of the mod frontpage code sets LOWEST_VALID_UID and LOWEST_VALID_GID. Users with UIDs and GIDs less than these values will not be able to run the server extensions. These values are configurable. For more information please check the SERK documentation and the Apache-fp page.

Greetings.

Lakhani and von Hippel also address the limits of FLOSS type support system regarding the number of support seekers in comparison to support providers, and also the type of information requested. They found that about 2% of the knowledge providers were responsible for about 50% of the answers to questions posted on the help system and 50% of the questions were provided by 24% of the knowledge providers. The 100 most active information seekers posted an average of 10.43 questions and the 100 most active information providers posted an average of 83.63 answers during the 4-year period of their study. This suggests that only few individuals are active in providing answers to questions asked in the Apache system.

Advantages

What works well. - There always are experts and users that provide answers

Criticism

What does not work that well, what needs to be improved, etc. - There is no obligation to provide support, thus there can be a lack of commitment. It is not possible to 'buy' support. - Advanced questions are often not answered, as they are at the forefront of the technology.

Examples

Looking at this presentation might helps to get an initial understanding on the different types of support available at FLOSS.

How could it work in education?

How could the FLOSS support model benefit formal education?

Summary / Resume

What have we learned here?

Questions

Aspects to be answered

See also

The FLOSS model of collaborative content production, re-use and peer review and the individual support layer - How can education benefit from it?

Internal and external links to related resources

Notes and references

1. Demaziere, D. (2006). How free software developers work, Môle Armoricain de Recherche sur la Société de l’Information et les Usages d’INternet. 2007. Available from: http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/CLES_DDFHNJ_juin_2006__vm_Anglais.pdf

2. Hemetsberger, A., 2006. Understanding Consumers’ Collective Action On The Internet: A Conceptualization And Empirical Investigation Of The Free- And Open-Source Movement. Available from http://hemetsberger.cc/publications/pdf/habilitation.pdf

3. Lakhani, K, and Hippel, E., 2003. How open source software works: free user-to-user assistance, Research Policy, Vol.32, pp: 923-943.

4. Swap, W., Leonard, D., Shields, M. and Abrams, L., 2001. Using mentoring and storytelling to transfer knowledge in the workplace, Journal of Management Information Systems, 18 (1), pp.95-114.

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