This page will contain a list of achievements I've done. Like studying and so. This page won't be finished, as I plan to continiously do stuff ;-).

I plan to graduate from the university in two areas, Human Geography and Computer Science. Thus far, I've studied since the autumn of 1996, and taken 200 credits. My thesis in Human Geography is finished, and can be downloaded here:

freesw-geo.ps.gz 447 Kb. This file is very large uncompressed, so it will take a while to open it in ghostview. Please note that ghostview will open the gzipped file too, so don't unzip it - save megs of space ;-). The dvi, eps's and .tex is available upon request.

In the thesis, I'm looking into the geographical distribution of developers in the Linux kernel and the Debian projects. The result is presented with a couple of maps over different parts of the world and also with an analysis based on locational theories. The thesis, unfortunately, is written in Swedish. The abstract is avilable in english here:

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the spatial distribution of free software developers in two projects, Debian and the Linux kernel. Further, it compare this distribution with the theories of spatial location of software companies. The thesis will also present the characteristics of free software and interview a few developers on their locational choices.

The main characteristics of free software is that it is free to use, distribute, copy and modify. It uses a distributed model of development, revolving mainly around the mailing list as a tool of communication.

The theories of location for the traditional software industry presented here are based on advantages of agglomeration. The industry tends to cluster in high-tech parks, university cities and major urban regions.

The distribution of developers in Debian and the Linux kernel closely follows that of the traditional software industry. USA and Europe dominates the pattern, and places like Silicon Valley and large cities have large quantities of developers. Other factors, such as income and computer usage, also seems to contribute to the general pattern. Further, as free software developers often work in the software industry, a locational correlation is expected.

The developer interviews were conducted with developers not fitting into the pattern, living in rural areas or smaller cities. Some of these work remotely in a way that apparently makes them free to choose their location. These choices were rarely attributed to their free software commitments.