@conference {689, title = {Evolution of Open Source Communities}, booktitle = {OSS2006: Open Source Systems (IFIP 2.13)}, series = {IFIP International Federation for Information Processing}, year = {2006}, note = {"we took snapshots of its membership at regular intervals" "we chose a one year period" "we retrieve the list of core developers ordered by their number of inbound messages, as noted above."}, pages = {21 - 32}, publisher = {Springer}, organization = {Springer}, abstract = {The goal of this paper is to document the evolution of a portfolio of related open source communities over time. As a case study, we explore the subprojects of the Apache project, one of the largest and most visible open source projects. We extract the community structure from the mailing list data, and study how the subcommunities evolve, and are interrelated over time. Our analysis leads us to propose the following hypotheses about the growth of open source communities: (1) communities add new developers by a process of preferential attachment; (2) links between existing communities are also subject to preferential attachment; (3) developers will migrate between communities together with other collaborators; and (4) information flow follows project dependencies. In particular, we are concerned with the underlying factors that motivate the migration between communities, such as information flow, co-worker ties, and project dependencies. }, keywords = {apache, COMMUNITY, core, developers, email, email archives, mailing list, membership}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34226-5_3}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/Evolution\%20of\%20Open\%20Source\%20Communities.pdf}, author = {Weiss, Michael and Moroiu, Gabriella and Zhao, Ping} } @proceedings {citeulike:3052508, title = {Development Success in Open Source Software Projects: Exploring the Impact of Copylefted Licenses}, year = {2005}, abstract = {Copyleft prevents the source code of open source software (OSS) from being privately appropriated. The ethos of the OSS movement suggests that volunteer developers may particularly value and contribute to copylefted projects. Based on social movement theory, we hypothesized that copylefted OSS projects are more likely than non-copylefted OSS projects to succeed in the development process, in terms of two key indicators: developer membership and developer productivity. We performed an exploratory study using data from 62 relevant OSS projects spanning an average of three years of development time. We found that copylefted projects were associated with higher developer membership and productivity. This is the first study to empirically test the relationship between copylefted licenses and OSS project success. Implications for OSS project initiators as well as future research directions are discussed.}, keywords = {contributions, copyleft, developer, developers, membership, productivity, project success, success}, url = {http://aisel.isworld.org/password.asp?Vpath=AMCIS/2005\&\#38;PDFpath=OSSDAU01-1167.pdf}, author = {Colazo, Jorge A. and Fang, Yulin and Neufeld, Derrick J.} } @proceedings {124, title = {Membership dynamics and network stability in the open-source community: the ising perspective}, year = {2004}, note = {"simulations with the empirical network data that were collected from two actual OSS communities, Linux and Hypermail." "we initially downloaded nearly 100,000 archived (between 1997 and 2003) LINUX Kernel and Hypermail newsgroup messages posted in a UNIX mailbox format" "Specific information was obtained regarding the characteristics of these two OSS communities, including the size, the number of average connections per participant, and the hierarchy of each community."}, abstract = {In this paper, we address the following two questions: (1)How does a participant{\textquoteright}s membership decision affect the others (neighbors) with whom he has collaborated over an extended period of time in an open source software (OSS) network? (2) To what extent do network characteristics (i.e, size and connectivity) mediate the impact of external factors on the OSS participants{\textquoteright} dynamic membership decisions and hence the stability of the network? From the Ising perspective, we present fresh theoretical insight into the dynamic and reciprocal membership relations between OSS participants. We also performed simulations based on empirical data that were collected from two actual OSS communities. Some of the key findings include that (1) membership herding is highly present when the external force is weak, but decreases significantly when the force increases, (2) the propensity for membership herding is most likely to be seen in a large network with a random connectivity, and (3) for large networks, at low external force a random connectivity will perform better than a scale-free counterpart in terms of the network strength. However, as the temperature (external force) increases, the reverse phenomenon is observed. In addition, the scale-free connectivity appears to be less volatile than with the random connectivity in response to the increase in the temperature. We conclude with several implications that may be of significance to OSS stakeholders.}, keywords = {email, email archive, hypermail, linux, mailing list, membership, membership herding, newsgroup, open source, participants, social network analysis, stakeholders, team size}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/OhJeon.pdf}, author = {Oh, Wonseok and Jeon, Sangyong} } @article {flosswp122, title = {Managing the Boundary of an {\textquoteright}Open{\textquoteright} Project}, year = {2003}, month = {October}, abstract = {In the past ten years, the boundaries between public and open science and commercial research efforts have become more porous. Scholars have thus more critically examined ways in which these two institutional regimes intersect. Large open source software projects have also attracted commercial collaborators and now struggle to develop code in an open public environment that still protects their communal boundaries. This research applies a dynamic social network approach to understand how one community managed software project, Debian, develops a membership process. We examine the project{\textquoteright}s face-to-face social network during a five-year period (1997-2001) to see how changes in the social structure affect the evolution of membership mechanisms and the determination of gatekeepers. While the amount and importance of a contributor{\textquoteright}s work increases the probability that a contributor will become a gatekeeper, those more central in the social network are more likely to become gatekeepers and influence the membership process. A greater understanding of the mechanisms open projects use to manage their boundaries has critical implications for research and knowledge producing communities operating in pluralistic, open and distributed environments.}, keywords = {debian, membership, social network analysis}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/omahonyferraro.pdf}, author = {Siobhan O{\textquoteright}Mahony} }