Cathedrals or bazaars?

Even I don´t fully agree with Reynold's proposal about Libre Software projects cathegorization [1], as I don't think that cathedrals were completely built by hierarchical organizations, whilst  bazaars are not actually "that" collaborative, there is no doubdt that it has been widely adopted by the LS community. Thus thinking about projects as bazaar-like managed is what prevails. And, well, maybe that, in general, this is the case with must LS projects. But, what happens with Public Administration led ones? Do they properly fit bazaar paradigma?

I begun thinking about this issue when we were preparing gisEIEL project releasing, last year. Being the "bible" of LS projects managing, I was then trying to follow Karl Fogel's reccomendations at his well known book "Producing Open Source software" [2]. But as we progressed in gisEIEL releasing tasks, I begun being more and more aware about that our project COULDN'T follow all of those reccomendations. As a consequence, I tried to figure out wether this happened to every PA led project.

To help myself in that task, I launched PA FOSS, a web based enquiry (not currently available) that contained a series of questions regarding all of the main points that Fogel mentions in his book. Even announced at several fora, it was completed just by four project managers (including myself), what can not be considered as statitically representative at all. Anyway, the contents of those four answers are homogeneous enough as to suspect that, when dealing with projects from Public Administration bodies, my thoughts about the existence of constrains to follow bazaar model are something more than just an intuition.

Why do I think so? Well, let's have a look at some of the results of the enquiry:

i. Developing

 In all of the four cases, developing is being made by teams from the own leading PA body, its associated institutions or contrated companies. In no case it was made by a free and self organized community.

Developing decissions are, thus, taken by project managing teams.

ii. Project releasing
All of the four projects were firstly released only when they had achieved all of the decided functionality. No alfa, beta or candidate releases. No code sharing until the applications were fully developed and functional enough. And, by the time when the enquiry was held, this applied as well to former versions.

iii. Funding
 Again, in no case funding came, not even partially, from the community or from private sources. Developing costs were totally paid with Public Administration funds.

iv. Community
So, is there any "community" around those projects? Well! Yes, it is! But not a self organized one. In general, what exists is a more or less wide series of tools to support the use of the applications and the intercommunication between their users and the project managing team, regarding mainly issues such as news announcement, applications testing, improvement proposals, bug tracking and so on. In some cases (i.e. gisEIEL [3]), there is also a Community Code of Conduct that rules that community's activity.

As said, this pattern does perfectly fit both four projects. Only in the case of gvSIG [4], given its wide success and the fact that its use has spreaded all over the world, the Public Administration body that launched the project (Generalitat Valenciana, in Spain) has begun to feel "over charged" by managing tasks and has been preparing project's total independence and self managing by means of the constitution of an Association that will take care of gvSIG from some time in this year on. From that moment, the project will no more depend on GV decissions and funding and, in the close future, these will only regard the developing of given components that the mentioned institution may be interested in.

But, why does this happen? Why PA lead projects seam to be that tightly dependent on PA bodies decissions and that poorly built on communities activity? Well, PA activities are tightly controled by a broad series of legislative rules that try to assure that they rely, between other principles, on that of the save and care use of public funds and on that PA bodies have always to preserve their prestige and public trusting. This implies that wells, services and products paid with public funds can not be distributed if they do not pass quality and completeness controls. The responsibility (and liability) of PA bodies on those products are clearly higher than in the case of those produced by private institutions. So, regarding PA Libre software projects, "control" is, more than a convenience, an absolute need. If not a legal imposition.

And this makes that a new question arises: are them actually "Libre" projects? In my opinion, must of them are. Freedom does not depend on how much community driven are the projects, but on what are the conditions under which the software is released. As far as they are distributed under an approved "Libre" license, with no added use constrains, for me they are "Libre" themselves. Tighter or looser managed, more or less community driven, but "Libre" anyway.

So, cathedrals or bazaars?


PS: As you probably noticed, I do always use the expresion "Libre Software" instead of "Free Software". That's because I understand that "Free" is quite a more ambiguous word (remember that of "Free as in freedom, not free as in free beer", what becomes useless if you simply use "Libre" instead). And, moreover this, "Libre" is independent from any given definition of what can be considered as "free" or "non free" software [5] [6], what IMHO becomes a valuable added value. :-)

[1]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
[2]: http://producingoss.com/
[3]: http://www.dicoruna.es/webeiel/giseiel/soportecomunidad.do
[4]: http://www.gvsig.org
[5]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[6]: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd

About the future of this blog

Hi again!

This posting will suppose a change in the course that this blog has been following this far.

'Going Free' was born as part of my practicum at Libre Software Master, held by Caixanova, Igalia and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. It would be the log of my work regarding the releasing of gisEIEL project. And, being an accademic exercise, it would:

• Be personally (and exclusively) written by me
• Relate only to gisEIEL project, and
• Be written in English (Yes, that was the very reason! What were you thinking of? :-D )

But in the meanwhile, it became the official news bulletin of our project, and now that the Master ends (Buaaahhhh!!!!!! LOC!!!!!! -Lots of crying-), the blog itself gets free of any conditionings. Hence from now on it may happen that you find that some postings are not written by me, but by any of the core developers and managers. Puede también ocurrir que algunas entradas estén escritas en español. Ou en galego. Oppure in Italiano. Aagso i dansk. Or in any other language, just in the same way as we decided having a single set of collaborative tools, despite what's the language of each single contributor, this way taking full advantage of the fact that we all can communicate one with all of the rest through the Internet and its tools.

A crazy experiment? Well, maybe! But as in the song:

The future will tell us

¿Qué será, será?

(or "Che sará, sará?", depending on the versions)

What will be, will be?

We don't believe in misticisms, but we strongly believe in "mestizaje". And as 'Blade Runner' followers, we also believe in "interlingua" ;-)

Our project is not very big, at least by the moment, and this fact will (I hope) let us keep things under control.

Finally, even still focused on gisEIEL, this blog may be open to other subjects. But always (and this is a promise) relating to GIS and Libre Software realms.

So: Farewell, you old blog! Wellcome (bienvenido, benvido, benvenutto, benvingut, welkome, willkomen,...) new 'Going Free'!

Consell Insular de Mallorca adopts gisEIEL

After a period of checking our software, Consell Insular de Mallorca (Majorca Island Council) has decided to adopt gisEIEL as software tool to manage EIEL and to be used as integration environment for all of their other GIS applications.

To prepare that adoption, a meeting was held at Diputación de A Coruña on 23rd July 2008 along which technicians from both institutions, as well as developers from UdC Database Lab, have discussed about what are the probable difficulties to overcome and the way to do so. Information on that meeting has been published at Diputación de A Coruña web site.

Now, it is Diputación de Valencia (Valencia Province Council) technicians who are evaluating gisEIEL. Hope that they also decide joining us.

Changes in project's hosting sites

As a consequence of the decission taken regarding what forges would the project be registered in, today gisEIEL has been removed from Sourforge. Thus, project's site at that forge does now redirect traffic to both OSOR forge and gisEIEL own web sites. Nevertheless, by the moment and until we come to an agreement with Mancomún representatives, no change has already been made at this forge's site.

This way, and as commented in my previous posting, almost all of the collaborative development and support tools will be hosted only at gisEIEL site, whilst OSOR and Mancomún (this latter in the close future) will contain mainly information on the project and a code repository.

We hope that these changes may let us keep a tighter monitoring of the project, at the time that they will minimize the risk of being serving different contents at each different site: coherence and consistency must prevail over other considerations!

The Battle of the Forges, Part II: 'And the winner is ...'

Last Friday 27th I attended an OSOR meeting at Brussels, and things have cleared a lot.

OSOR's goal is to become the central observatory and repository of both code and information from and for EU public administrations. It is to be born with the aim of freedom of use, so that most of its tools will be simply of volunteer use. It thus clearly becomes the solution for gisEIEL.

Nevertheless, as Mancomún is devoted to promoting the use of FOSS in Galicia, which is gisEIEL home country, we feel that we should keep our project registered with them. This will introduce a little 'noise' in our managing tools. But anyway! Will try to cope with it!

So, our solution is using just gisEIEL project own collaborative tools, despite what's the language used (be it Galician, Spanish or English), thus building a multilingual environment that we believe that will perfectly fit the actual reality of our target users/collaborators. As an example: at the above mentioned OSOR meeting, at least five different languages were used (English, Spanish, Italian, French and Danish -and maybe also Irish-), despite the fact that English was the official one. And everybody seemed to feel quite comfortable with that situation, moving on-the-fly from a language to another, with total naturality.

So, summarizing: our next steps will hence be:

• Registering at OSOR
• Negotiating the (un-)use of Mancomún tools
• Going on incorporating new members to ourcommunity (by the way: more news will follow on this issue soon)

And the winner is ... (drums sounding): "There's no winner, her Majesty!" (An America's Cup classic :-D)

The Battle of the Forges, or where should I post my project?

If you remember past entries, we have registered gisEIEL project at Mancomún and Sourceforge forges, as a way to facilitate the access to it from users coming from different regions (Galicia and the rest of the world, in this case) But now we face a problem: each forge does automatically launch its own series of supporting and collaborative tools. Result: our project "enjoys" now three bugtrackers, three sets of mailing lists, three code repositories, three svn and two sets of fora (project's site lacks of this tool).

And the question is that those tools cannot be linked one to each other. I mean, our will would be that we could set a link from Mancomún and Sourceforge bugtrackers to our own. And the same for mailing lists. But this seems not to be possible.

But the problem doesn't end here. Now, a new forge has come to town: OSOR, the European Commission's Open Source Observatory and Repository. It deals with the task of fostering the use of OS software by European administration bodies and, as a consequence, its responsibles want administration born projects to be served from their forge. And gisEIEL is administration born. And it is addressed to administration bodies use. And, of course, it has been invited to register at OSOR.

But, once again, OSOR will provide the project with new sets of collaborative tools. So, we face now the need to take the decission of registering or not at OSOR. And to do so, we will have to ballance the convenience of supporting OSOR initiative (High) against the need for new, quadruplicated collaborative tools (None, indeed)

So, the decission is ... (drums sounding ... .... .... ...

Ehmmm! Well! Keep in contact and you'll know!

Diputación de Pontevedra adopts gisEIEL

Diputación de Pontevedra (Pontevedra Province Council) has also adopted gisEIEL as their GIS tool to manage EIEL geodatabase. In some weeks, we will hold a meeting to transmit to them our know-how on that matter and to coordinate our databases, given that both provinces share borders one with each other

About project's size

Wondered about what's our project size? Do you want to know it prior to downloading code? Ok, no problem: here you have some figures about it.

Data generated using David A. Wheeler's SLOCCOUNT on gisEIEL and webEIEL

(SLOCCount, Copyright (C) 2001-2004 David A. Wheeler - SLOCCount is Open Source Software/Free Software, licensed under the GNU GPL)

1.- gisEIEL:

• SLOC Directory SLOC-by-Language (Sorted)
• CatalogoMetadatos
• java=38517
• jsp=1174
• EIEL-FichaMunicipal java=32931
• EIEL-Formularios-Alfanumericos java=17672
• EIEL-GeneracionFormularios java=10251
• EIEL-GisEIEL java=8714
• EIEL-Validaciones java=3547
• EIEL-Informes java=1344
• RemisionDatosEIEL java=982
• EIEL-GestionDeMapasGisEIEL java=948
• EIEL-GestionPermisosGrupos java=570
• EIEL-Autenticacion java=526
• EIEL-Utilidades java=482
• EIEL-DeGeomASimpleGeom java=443

• Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):

• java: 116927 (99.01%)
• jsp: 1174 (0.99%)

• Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 118,101
• Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 29.98 (359.81)
• (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
• Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 1.95 (23.40)
• (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
• Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule) = 15.38
• Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 4,050,493
• (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40)

2.- webEIEL

• SLOC Directory SLOC-by-Language (Sorted):
• EIEL-Web
• java=7736
• jsp=7374
• php=114
• EIEL-VisualizadorSVG java=8688
• EIEL-Nomenclator
  
• java=4952
• jsp=91
• EIEL-ServicioNomenclator java=2794
• EIEL-AWMS java=1541

• Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):

• java: 25711 (77.23%)
• jsp: 7465 (22.42%)
• php: 114 (0.34%)

• Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 33,290
• Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 7.93 (95.20)
• (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
• Schedule Estimate, Years (Months) = 1.18 (14.12)
• (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
• Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule) = 6.74
• Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 1,071,695
• (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).

Hope this helped! :)

R-Day

Uuuffff! Done! Quite a busy couple of days. With accessing problems included. Fortunately, everything seems to be fixed now.

Of course, there's still field for improvement, and despite what's the response of the community, we will go on upgrading our software. In fact, first improvement is already in the way: after presenting the software to the press and to the municipalities, I received the OK document to begin to work in the developing of municipalities management modules for gisEIEL. No rest, after releasing!!!! But that's really good news for the team.

By the way, here you have some three photos of (almost all of) the developing team taken during yesterday's events.

The team:
From left to right: Jose Ignacio Lamas, Xosé-Fco Freire, Verónica Fariña, Pedro A. González, Mª Isabel Pérez-Urría, Xoán Cabo, Miguel R.Luaces, Nuria G. Cadahía and David Trillo (Photo: Torrecilla)

Preparing presentation (Photo: Torrecilla)

Presenting (Photo: Torrecilla)

The only releasing tasks that are still missing are those that have to do with publicising the project at some forges, namely Mancomún (Galician forge) and Sourceforge (Internat ... Oh, well! You already know) But this will be done next week. We've had enough for a couple of days! :-)

A little explanation: so far I hadn't still mentioned Xoán Cabo and Xosé-Fco. Freire They are, respectively, the Provincial Councellor in charge of Cooperation and Adviosry to the Municipalities, and the Chief Architect of the Unit of Technical Advisory to the Municipalities.

And a mention has to be done to all that people at A Coruña University who have worked or are still working to capture, maintain, update, analyze and "extract juice" of BDT-EIEL data. Here are the names of the different heads of areas: Carlos Nárdiz (General Head), Pablo Regueira (General municipal information and Mapping) Joaquín Suárez (Water supply and sewage) and Alberto Varela (Roads network and Services). The names of the rest of the people are listed here.

gisEIEL is free!

And today is the day: gisEIEL has matured as libre software and starts a new and more public life, out of our laboratories at Diputación de A Coruña and A Coruña University.

Its homesite, from which you can download both code, software and documentation, is http://www.dicoruna.es/webeiel/giseiel



There you will find information on how to download and install the software and on how to join our Community!.

Enjoy our software and join our team!

A couple of images of presentation at GPUL

Presentation at "Xornadas de Software Libre"

Next Monday, we will present our project at "VIII Xornadas de Software Libre", that are being held at Informatics Faculty of A Coruña University and organised by GPUL (Linux Users and Programmers Group)

The date is on Monday 7th, at 17:15 LT, and in Classroom number 3.0

Hope meeting you there

R-Day

Confirmed! Unless 'meigas', 'trolls' or even 'gnomes' ;-) play one of their awful games, R-Day will be April 24th. More news will follow soon.

In the meanwhile, and in the very Ubuntu stile (see below): We are now just 1 day to go! Exactly the same as for Ubuntu 8.04 release! Tomorrow promises to be a really interesting day: Two great projects release their last versions! ;-)