IBM Users Research Articles

For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution by Christopher J. Tozzi

Reviewed by: For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution by Christopher J. Tozzi Mark Priestley (bio) For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution. By Christopher J. Tozzi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Pp. 336. Hardcover $30. The term "free and open source software" (FOSS) does not primarily refer to software written for a specific application or to a particular approach to software production, but rather to the manner of its distribution. Typically, FOSS can be used, modified, and redistributed without the hindrance of, or payment to, its original authors. "Free" signifies liberty as well as the absence of cost, and "open source" means that the secrets of the software's code are exposed. [End Page 655] There has always been free software. Electronic computers were originally sold without software and users collaborated to exchange information and code, as the name of the 1950s IBM user group SHARE suggests. Software soon became commercialized, of course, but traditions of openness persisted, notably in universities. In the 1980s, largely due to the activities of MIT programmer Richard Stallman, a discourse of "free software" emerged in opposition to the perceived commercialization of hitherto widely available code, in particular the Unix operating system developed at Bell Labs. By the turn of the millennium, FOSS developers had created the GNU/Linux operating system and several other significant products. FOSS is now a crucial part of the networked world, providing both software—for example web servers, desktop environments, and the FOSS-derived Android operating system that powers the majority of the world's mobile phones—and many of the programming languages in which that software is written. Tozzi describes this transformation as a "revolution" and uses this metaphor to structure his book. However, he does not mention Thomas Kuhn's 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or the voluminous literature inspired by it. Instead, the book uses a high-level schema derived from reflection on historical revolutions to structure the story of FOSS. For example, a chapter entitled "the Moderate FOSS Revolution" is associated with Louis XVI's acceptance of a constitutional monarchy in France in 1789 and the period between the March and October 1917 revolutions in Russia, with Tozzi commenting that "it is generally during the moderate stage that the most productive and enduring revolutionary changes arise" (p. 163). The use of this structuring device seems rather artificial and does not add much insight to the story of FOSS. Tozzi begins his story with Unix, a system he describes as embodying much of the ethos of "hacker culture". He draws on Stephen Levy's book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Doubleday, 1984) to flesh out this rather vague notion, and in many ways Tozzi's book reads as an extension of Levy's narrative to the history of FOSS. A "crisis" in this culture (the word is not used in Kuhn's sense) caused by the attempted commercialization of Unix led uber-hacker Stallman to propose the term "free software" and to start an attempt to create a "free" version of Unix. In one crucial respect (the production of the so-called "kernel" of the system) this effort stalled, and only the efforts of a project initiated in 1991 by Finnish student Linus Torvalds enabled the production of a complete operating system, usually simply called Linux. The heroic exploits of Stallman and Torvalds are recounted in a chapter each and the book then follows the revolutionary script by describing, after the stage of moderate revolution, a period of "revolutionary war" characterized by infighting between proponents of different ideological approaches to FOSS and also between FOSS advocates and Microsoft. A final chapter surveys the successes of FOSS in the years since 2000. [End Page 656] Tozzi provides a lively and entertaining account of these developments, but much of the story is available in popular and journalistic accounts, and readers may be left feeling that an opportunity to dig deeper has been missed. Anxious to prevent the commercial capture of free software, FOSS developers have proposed a bewildering variety of licenses under which it can be distributed, and while Tozzi describes...

Building ease of use into the IBM user experience

This issue of the IBM Systems Journal explores the topic of building ease of use into the IBM user experience with hardware, software, Web sites, and services. This paper provides an overview of the process and organizational transformation that IBM has gone through in improving the user experience with our offerings. IBM's process for building ease of use into the user experience is described and two versions of the process are introduced and contrasted. The IBM User-Centered Design (UCD) approach, which has been used for the last several years, is contrasted with the traditional approach to the development of offerings. A recent major enhanced version of the process, called User Engineering (UE), which is optimized for the IBM e-business on demand™ strategy, is contrasted with the existing UCD process. The key elements of our enablement, leadership, and guidance strategy for these processes are outlined, including mission, process integration, education and training, communication, collaboration, and tools and technology. An overview of the papers in this issue is also provided.

Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration: The IBM User Group, Share

Ce groupe fonde par des utilisateurs de l'ordinateur central IBM 704 et ensuite 709, se developpa en reponse a un manque de donnees techniques dans une industrie relativement recente, mais aussi une carence au niveau des programmeurs. La contribution majeure de ce groupe fut de creer des ressources techniques servant a l'usage des machines et egalement de developper la professionnalisation de la programmation informatique.

Change, information and understanding

article Free Access Share on Change, information and understanding: conference themes in 1997-98 Author: Millicent Cooley IBM's User Interface Architecture Group in Austin, Texas IBM's User Interface Architecture Group in Austin, TexasView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCHI BulletinVolume 30Issue 3July 1998 pp 11–15https://doi.org/10.1145/565711.565718Online:01 July 1998Publication History 0citation159DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads159Last 12 Months1Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Aligning bilingual corpus: Especially for language pairs from different families

Rather than using a length-based or translation-based criterion to align bilingual texts, this paper proposes a part-of-speech-based (POS-based) criterion. The postulation is that bilingual texts should share the same concepts, ideas, entities, and events. In addition, these are usually represented by some critical POSes. Thus, the numbers of critical POSes in a language pair of a bead are close. This criterion has two advantages: one is its uniform behavior across the different language families; the other is its simplicity comparing to translation-based criterion. Divide-and-conquer, dynamic programming, and simulated annealing techniques are used to implement the POS-based alignment algorithm. Under the order constraint of alignment, this paper introduces a performance evaluation method to calculate precision and recall. A concept of incremental beads measures the degree of matching between real bead sequence and computed bead sequence. Two important issues are considered in the experiments. On the one hand, the test texts are in languages from different families, i.e., Chinese (an oriental language) and English (an occidental language). On the other hand, they are selected from diversified registers, such as Sinorama Magazine and an IBM User Manual. The experimental results show that the simulated annealing approach has very good performance. In aligning texts from Sinorama Magazine, the recall is 94.4% and the precision is 94.9% by using paragraph markers. Without paragraph markers, the recall is 96.7% and the precision is 97.2% for aligning the IBM User Manual.

Impact of Computer-User Interface on Document Quality

This study examined the relationship between computer-user interface (character based or graphical) and the quality of written documents. Students were randomly assigned to one of two business communication labs, Macintosh or IBM. Both groups received identical lectures on business communication principles and practices. T-test analyses of two documents produced during the course compared the groups on four document criteria: content, structure, mechanics, and format. After six weeks of business communication instruction, including three 50-minute class periods of instruction on their respective computers and software, IBM users excelled on the criteria of mechanics (as hypothesized) and format (contrary to the hypothesis). After an additional five weeks of business communication instruction and use of their respective computer systems, the two groups demonstrated no significant differences on any of the criteria. The findings challenge Halio's claims for the superiority of character-based interface.

The evolution of the Common User Access Workplace Model

This paper describes some of the influences contributing to and issues in dealing with the evolution of user interface guidelines over time. In particular, we focus on the evolution of IBM's user interface architecture, the Common User Access™ (CUA™) interface, over a period of six years. Discussed are the key architectural and design elements of the CUA Workplace Model, the fundamental shifts in computer-human interaction that have occurred since the first publication of the guidelines in 1987, and how user interface design, operating systems, and tools have interacted in the evolution of the guidelines. The information should help designers of user interfaces and developers of useirn terface guidelines to appreciate some of the factors involved in the long-term evolution of a user interface style. The paper provides an introduction to the most recent evolutionary step in the CUA style (the Workplace Model) to help the reader place these factors in perspective relative to the degree of evolutionary change.

Software Reviews : The Spreadsheet Auditor

This is a utility for IBM users of VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, or SuperCalc. It prints out the formulas behind a spreadsheet in the same row-and-columns grid as the spreadsheet itself. This can be an invaluable aid in verifying the correctness of one's formulas in a complex model. Operation of the program is a simple matter of specifying the spreadsheet file to be analyzed; specifying the output device (screen, printer, text file); specifying the output parameters It should be noted that Lotus and SuperCalc spreadsheet files must first be saved as print files (an extra step), whereas The Spreadsheet Auditor uses VisiCalc files directly. Overall, the program operates easily. This is a utility which those who regularly use spreadsheets will want to own.

Review of two fourth generation products for IBM users

Two products available to IBM users for fourth generation system building are Adabas and Model 204. Both are based on DBMS products and both outperform IBM's current offerings in this area. Model 204 has a language called User Language, uses an inverted file architecture to manage data and is designed so that separate TP monitor, compiler etc. are not required. Adabas uses natural as its 4GL, uses inverted files and tree structures for data management, and interfaces with other systems for hardware management.

VM as a migration aid for IBM users

The IBM operating system VM/370 and its derivative systems are useful for operating system conversion, release migration, and systems programmer productivity. These benefits are applicable to installations of all sizes from a single 4331 to multiple processors ranging up to the 3081.

Computer simulation call for papers

The 1978 Summer Computer Simulation Conference (SCSC) will be held at the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel, California, July 24–26, 1978. The conference is sponsored by the Society for Computer Simulation (Simulation Councils, Inc.), Instrument Society of America, American Meteorological Society, and SHARE (IBM Users Group). With ‘Simulation Today’ as its theme, it will deal with such topical areas as energy, managerial and social sciences, biological systems, environmental sciences, physical sciences, and simulation methodology.