Major corporate supporters abandon the FSF, while board members and leaders resign from the organization, as the outrage over Richard M. Stallman being allowed back on the board continues to grow.

Open-source software is at the core of… well, practically everything online. But while much of it is diligently maintained in some ways, in others it doesn’t receive the kind of scrutiny that something so foundational ought to. To that end, $1.3 million worth of grants were announced today, split among 13 projects looking to ensure […]

Author(s): Geiger, R Stuart; Howard, Dorothy; Irani, Lilly | Abstract: Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly.

On labor in nonprofits

Stratplan for a suite of DH services. Uncompromising about the necessary resource allocations; also very clear about where the money's going.

Since the advent of digital scholarship in the humanities, decades of extensive, distributed scholarly efforts have produced a digital scholarly record that is increasingly scattered, heterogeneous, and independent of curatorial institutions. Digital scholarship produces collections with unique scholarly and cultural value—collections that serve as hubs for collaboration and communication, engage broad audiences, and support new research. Yet, lacking systematic support for digital scholarship in libraries, digital humanities collections are facing a widespread crisis of sustainability. This paper provides outcomes of a multimodal study of sustainability challenges confronting digital collections in the humanities, characterizing institutional and community-oriented strategies for sustaining collections. Strategies that prioritize community engagement with collections and the maintenance of sociotechnical workflows suggest possibilities for novel approaches to collaborative, community-centred sustainability for digital humanities collections.

Going after stuff digitized by NARA with commercial partners.

Governance  Coverage across the research enterprise – it is increasingly clear that research transcends disciplines, geography, institutions and stakeholders. The infrastructure that supports it needs …

The open source movement runs on the heroic efforts of not enough people doing too much work. They need help.

Flossbank provides a free and frictionless way to support Open Source maintainers across the entire dependency tree of your installed packages.

Free and open-source software underpins the digital world. Federal funding should prioritize its development and maintenance.

Don’t blame COBOL. Blame austerity.

For the last couple of years, DigitalOcean has run Hacktoberfest, which purports to “support open source” by giving free t-shirts to people who send pull requests to open source repositories.  In reality, Hacktoberfest is a corporate-s...

An example of academics going feral on librarians re digitization without the LEAST SLIGHTEST CLUE what they're talking about. FFS. Wankers.

Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we'll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble.

Will code move on to a language such as Rust? 'I'm convinced it's going to happen' says kernel colonel

I have a story to tell. My last y...