I was writing a blog post about the ideological tendencies in free software and I found myself on a side note that I think really wants to be it’s own post. Funny how that happens. I was thinking about the role and importance of system administrators in free software communities and development. This post is part of an ongoing thread on dialectical futurism about systems administration and its implications.
One might think, because free software communities produce software, that free software communities are communities of software developers. Programmers make software, free software is software, ergo… But I really think that a significant differentiating factor between free and non-free software is that free software tends to be created, shaped, and designed by people who are systems administrators by trade and inclination rather than people who are primarily software developers.
This is a somewhat difficult argument, and one that requires us to presume that the boundary between developers and administrators is impermeable (it isn’t,) but I think people who are programmers first and administrators second approach technological problems. Systems administrators write code. Lots of code. Any system that must be administered (deployed, modified, and maintained) “by hand” is probably a broken system. Scripting and automation are the keys to making systems maintainable in the long run. And the boundary between writing a few (dozen (dozen)) scripts and writing an operating system is probably not that great in the grand scheme of things.
And knowing how operating systems work is probably a key to making them work. In this case, we can imagine that systems administrators like open source operating systems (i.e. Linux and GNU based ones) because their inner workings are knowable, so system administrators are likely to reap much larger benefits from free software than other classes of users.
I’ve often found that understanding the richness and complexity of the “value” of Free Software and Open Source software is important for understanding why free software continues to exist and may be worth adopting. The value of free software comes from: the fact that there are no licensing costs, the freedom you have to modify the software to your needs and potentially largely ameliorate development costs, finally free software is valuable because it creates smarter users by virtue of its origins in academia and the way that it promotes user independence and community involvement.
Business decision makers might like the fact that the initial cost of free software is minimal and controlled, but most software related costs are probably support related and free software may not do much to minimize those costs. Developers may like that free software could make their jobs easier, but they may also suffer from “not invented here” syndrome, and be resistant to working on projects that (potentially) suffer from design decisions that they disagree with. Systems administrators may have preferences regarding certain pieces of software, but will generally like the additional control that free software offers them.
I wonder about the inverse: has the involvement of systems administrators in free software had an affect on the shape of that software? Do we use Linux and BSD-Unix because they’re easier to administer? Does this extend to the network protocols and technologies that get used more frequently?
Let’s file this under “questions I wish I knew how to answer…”
Onward and Upward!