@article {GonzalezBarahona2008356,
	title = {Geographic origin of libre software developers},
	journal = {Information Economics and Policy},
	volume = {20},
	number = {4},
	year = {2008},
	note = {Empirical Issues in Open Source Software},
	pages = {356 - 363},
	abstract = {This paper examines the claim that libre (free, open source) software involves global development. The anecdotal evidence is that developers usually work in teams including individuals residing in many different geographical areas, time zones and even continents and that, as a whole, the libre software community is also diverse in terms of national origin. However, its exact composition is difficult to capture, since there are few records of the geographical location of developers. Past studies have been based on surveying a limited (and sometimes biased) sample and extrapolating that sample to the global distribution of developers. In this paper we present an alternate approach in which databases are analyzed to create traces of information from which the geographical origin of developers can be inferred. Applying this technique to the SourceForge users database and the mailing lists archives from several large projects, we have estimated the geographical origin of more than one million individuals who are closely related to the libre software development process. The paper concludes that the result is a good proxy for the actual distribution of libre software developers working on global projects.},
	keywords = {developers, email, email address, email archives, geography, mailing list, open source software, sourceforge, timezone, users},
	issn = {0167-6245},
	doi = {DOI: 10.1016/j.infoecopol.2008.07.001},
	url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V8J-4T3DCPK-1/2/3981dfbc523eae1d1ce65fb1f0c0edb7},
	author = {Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona and Gregorio Robles and Roberto Andradas-Izquierdo and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh}
}
@conference {Robles:2006:GLD:1137983.1138017,
	title = {Geographic location of developers at SourceForge},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories},
	series = {MSR {\textquoteright}06},
	year = {2006},
	pages = {144{\textendash}150},
	publisher = {ACM},
	organization = {ACM},
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	abstract = {The development of libre (free/open source) software is usually performed by geographically distributed teams. Participation in most cases is voluntary, sometimes sporadic, and often not framed by a pre-defined management structure. This means that anybody can contribute, and in principle no national origin has advantages over others, except for the differences in availability and quality of Internet connections and language. However, differences in participation across regions do exist, although there are little studies about them. In this paper we present some data which can be the basis for some of those studies. We have taken the database of users registered at SourceForge, the largest libre software development web-based platform, and have inferred their geographical locations. For this, we have applied several techniques and heuristics on the available data (mainly e-mail addresses and time zones), which are presented and discussed in detail. The results show a snapshot of the regional distribution of SourceForge users, which may be a good proxy of the actual distribution of libre software developers. In addition, the methodology may be of interest for similar studies in other domains, when the available data is similar (as is the case of mailing lists related to software projects).},
	keywords = {distributed, email, email address, free software, geographical location, geography, libre software, mining software repositories, open source software, sourceforge, timezone},
	isbn = {1-59593-397-2},
	doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1137983.1138017},
	url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1137983.1138017},
	attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/144GeographicLocation.pdf},
	author = {Gregorio Robles and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona}
}
@conference {Robles:2005:DIM:1083142.1083162,
	title = {Developer identification methods for integrated data from various sources},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories},
	series = {MSR {\textquoteright}05},
	year = {2005},
	pages = {106-110},
	publisher = {ACM},
	organization = {ACM},
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	abstract = {Studying a software project by mining data from a single repository has been a very active research field in software engineering during the last years. However, few efforts have been devoted to perform studies by integrating data from various repositories, with different kinds of information, which would, for instance, track the different activities of developers. One of the main problems of these multi-repository studies is the different identities that developers use when they interact with different tools in different contexts. This makes them appear as different entities when data is mined from different repositories (and in some cases, even from a single one). In this paper we propose an approach, based on the application of heuristics, to identify the many identities of developers in such cases, and a data structure for allowing both the anonymized distribution of information, and the tracking of identities for verification purposes. The methodology will be presented in general, and applied to the GNOME project as a case example. Privacy issues and partial merging with new data sources will also be considered and discussed.},
	keywords = {anonymization, bug tracker, developers, email, email address, gnome, identity, mailing list, privacy, source code, version control},
	isbn = {1-59593-123-6},
	doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1082983.1083162},
	url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1082983.1083162},
	attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/106DeveloperIdentification.pdf},
	author = {Gregorio Robles and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona}
}
