Considering the Use of Walled Gardens for FLOSS Project Communication

Abstract

At its core, free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) is defined by its adherence to a set of licenses that give various freedoms to the users of the software, for example the ability to use the software, to read or modify its source code, and to distribute the software to others. In addition, many FLOSS projects and developers also champion other values related to "freedom" and "openness", such as transparency, for example in communication and decision-making, or community-orientedness, for example in broadening access, collaboration, and participation. This paper explores how one increasingly common software development practice-communicating inside non-archived, third-party "walled gardens"-puts these FLOSS values into conflict. If communities choose to use non-archived walled gardens for communication, they may be prioritizing one type of openness (broad participation) over another (transparency). We use 18 FLOSS projects as a sample to describe how walled gardens are currently being used for intra-project communication, as well as to determine whether or not these projects provide archives of these communications. Findings will be useful to the FLOSS community as a whole as it seeks to understand the evolution and impact of its communication choices.

The impact of the shift to cloud computing on digital recordkeeping practices at the University of Michigan Bentley historical library

“…However, as Luciana Duranti points out, due to this shift to the cloud and the dynamic nature of tools optimized for real-time collaboration, the "by-products of such interaction are no longer finite entities, but processes that are always changing," calling the evidential value of records into question (2015), even for those institutions like the Bentley with well-established born-digital recordkeeping and digital preservation policies and procedures. In some ways, these external cloud-based services are like "walled gardens," or "non-open and corporate-controlled systems" that "prioritiz[e] one type of openness (broad participation) over another (transparency)" by improving the ability of university-affiliates to use records in their active state while complicating the ability of archivists to faithfully preserve all aspects of those records in their inactive state (Squire 2017). These issues are not unique to cloud contexts and are also present when archiving locally controlled infrastructure such as organizational shared network drives (and, again, other dynamic types of records like websites and social media), but the opaqueness and lack of transparency around some cloud providers only serves to further complicate the issues.…”