Innovation in Open Source Software Development: A Tale of Two Features

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1 Innovation in Open Source Software Development: A Tale of Two Features John Noll Computer Engineering Department, Santa Clara University [email protected] June 12, 2007

2 what drives open source innovation? itch scratching (Raymond) Krishnamurthy s data support this idea in general asserted requirements (Scacchi; German) users provide ideas, motivation (Reis & de Matties Flores; Feller & Fitzgerald) open source follows commercial state of the art (Nichols & Twidale) conventional requirements elicitation might work better (Henderson; Trudelle; Nichols & Twidale),

(Scacchi; German) users provide ideas, motivation (Reis & de Matties Flores; Feller & Fitzgerald)

3 some serious itches

4 method two projects one feature from each (metacity) tabbed browsing edge magnetism

5 firefox

6 tabbed browsing

7 genesis June 23, 1999, netscape.public.mozilla.wishlist Vladimir Neyman: One thing that I would really want to see is the ability to open a link in the new window in background (i.e. the focus should remain in my current window, and new window should load silently, without bothering me until it is ready and I am ready to read it). Gboone s response: Have you tried tabbed browsing? Now that I ve tried it, I won t go back to windows everywhere. The idea is that pages have their own tabbed windows. Instead of juggling windows, you just click their tabs. The beauty part is new pages open in the background, just as you requested. The tab tells you when the page is done loading. Then you just click over. Shweet!

Gboone s response: Have you tried tabbed browsing? Now that I ve tried it, I won t go back to windows everywhere. The idea is that pages have their own tabbed windows.

8 timeline Multizilla: H.J. van Rantwijk, Native Mozilla (April 2001), after implementation: Firefox being rejected by Dave Hyatt, implementation: First mention Mozilla v. 0.97, Dave Hyatt, Firefox release (June 1999) developers (December 2001) v. 0.3 (October 2002) 1.0 (November 2004)

Firefox being rejected by Dave Hyatt, implementation: First mention

9 observations asserted requirement (H.J. van Rantwijk) that was rejected implementation as XUL extension proves usefulness enthusiastic discussion by users

10 metacity... people praise Sawfish features yet they hate the massive amount of bugs. These two things go hand in hand. There is a reason Sawfish is practically not maintained anymore.

11 edge magnetism or resistance

12 timeline RFE (Havoc Pennington (24) Reporter, comments on patches (Havoc lively discussion of feature released (Elijah Newren (26) Developer) Pennington) patches Developer) Timon Christl (0) Patrick Aussemes (2) Juergen Kreileder (5) Bryan Clark (16)

Newren (26) Developer) Pennington) patches Developer) Timon

13 the usability debate Elijah Newren (Developer, 26 points):... Saying gravity would be the real world analog of window attraction in the window manager says that either (a) one of the windows dwarfs the other in size... or (b) that the end user has experience moving planets around while they re in relatively close proximity to each other. Like Seth, the only other analogy besides gravity that I can think of for window attraction is magnets. But most objects are not magnetic and I see no reason a user would expect a window to be magnetic...

14 users chime in (in another forum: gnomesupport.org/forums) Lou (August, 2003): Recently, I updated my box to Redhat 9.0 and dropped Sawfish in favour of Metacity. However, there are two things I used to use in Sawfish I am not able to use in Metacity:... - Switch on windows magnetism to help a easy windows placement.... Wonkothesane (September, 2003): Fly has a point about the usability of Metacity. I understand the complaints about the bloat in Sawfish, but as far as memory footprint is concerned, there is very little difference between Sawfish and Metacity... I ve been using Metacity since Gnome but it would be very nice if Metacity would remember window sizes and placement. As far as I m concerned, that is a window manager s job, and Metacity is clearly shirking that job.

... Wonkothesane (September, 2003): Fly has a point about the usability of Metacity.

15 Fly (September, 2003):... I understand that many features in Sawfish [are] excessive or unrelated to WM, but 80% of Sawfish features very useful and I need it - you not? Dbrody (September, 2003): But if only > 5% of people need > 80% of those features then you have just proved that it is bloat. Bloat doesn t mean memory foot print. That is NOT what anybody cares about the extra 1k of ram. Bloat means the maintainer needs to start maintaining more features. More bug reports. More tweaking of those advanced features. etc... etc... Metacity is not even 1.0 yet. There are many changes that are planned to go into Metacity but haven t yet because things go a little slowly, or because it will make Metacity incompatible with themes and so forth.

That is NOT what anybody cares about the extra 1k of ram. Bloat means the maintainer needs to start maintaining more features. More bug reports. More tweaking of those advanced features.

16 users ignored? RFE (Havoc Pennington (24) Reporter, comments on patches (Havoc lively discussion of feature released (Elijah Newren (26) Developer) Pennington) patches Developer) Timon Christl (0) users Juergen Bryan Clark (16) Patrick debate Kreileder Aussemes (2) features (5) vs. bloat

17 observations asserted requirement (by Havoc Pennington) usability explored and debated through implementation (by user-developers) enthusiastic discussion by users (ignored?)

18 conclusion what could closed-source software projects adopt? open communication channels extension mechanisms multiple paths to release

19 acknowledgments This work was supported in part by a grant from the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University. No endorsement is implied.

Innovation in Open Source Software Development

Innovation in Open Source Software Development John Noll Santa Clara University Computer Engineering Department 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA USA [email protected] Abstract. Open Source Software