@article {bettenburg2013management, title = {Management of community contributions}, journal = {Empirical Software Engineering}, year = {2013}, pages = {1{\textendash}38}, publisher = {Springer}, abstract = {In recent years, many companies have realized that collaboration with a thriving user or developer community is a major factor in creating innovative technology driven by market demand. As a result, businesses have sought ways to stimulate contributions from developers outside their corporate walls, and integrate external developers into their development process. To support software companies in this process, this paper presents an empirical study on the contribution management processes of two major, successful, open source software ecosystems. We contrast a for-profit (ANDROID) system having a hybrid contribution style, with a not-for-profit (LINUX kernel) system having an open contribution style. To guide our comparisons, we base our analysis on a conceptual model of contribution management that we derived from a total of seven major open-source software systems. A quantitative comparison based on data mined from the ANDROID code review system and the LINUX kernel code review mailing lists shows that both projects have significantly different contribution management styles, suited to their respective market goals, but with individual advantages and disadvantages that are important for practitioners. Contribution management is a real-world problem that has received very little attention from the research community so far. Both studied systems (LINUX and ANDROID) employ different strategies and techniques for managing contributions, and both approaches are valuable examples for practitioners. Each approach has specific advantages and disadvantages that need to be carefully evaluated by practitioners when adopting a contribution management process in practice.}, keywords = {android, contribution, linux, management}, url = {http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-013-9284-6}, author = {Bettenburg, Nicolas and Hassan, Ahmed E. and Adams, Bram and Daniel M. German} } @proceedings {1288, title = {An Analysis of Author Contribution Patterns in Eclipse Foundation Project Source Code}, year = {2011}, note = {"We conducted an observational study on existing Eclipse projects by extracting author attribution data for Java source code files from git repositories." "Specifically, we consider entropy of source code by counting the number of lines attributed to each author."}, month = {10/2011}, pages = {269-281}, publisher = {Springer}, abstract = {Collaborative development is a key tenet of open source software, but if not properly understood and managed, it can become a liability. We examine author contribution data for the newest revision of 251,633 Java source files in 592 Eclipse projects. We use this observational data to analyze collaboration patterns within files, and to explore relationships between file size, author count, and code authorship. We calculate author entropy to characterize the contributions of multiple authors to a given file, with an eye toward understanding the degree of collaboration and the most common interaction patterns.}, keywords = {COLLABORATION, contribution, eclipse, entropy, java}, author = {Taylor, Quinn C. and Krein, Jonathan L. and MacLean, Alexander C. and Knutson, Charles D.} } @article {1376, title = {Sustainability of Open-Source Projects: A Longitudinal Study}, journal = {Journal of the Association for Information Systems}, volume = {11}, number = {5}, year = {2010}, abstract = {This paper examines the factors that influence the long-term sustainability of FLOSS projects. A model of project sustainability based on organizational ecology is developed and tested empirically. Data about activity and contribution patterns over the course of five years for 2,772 projects registered with SourceForge is analyzed. Our results suggest that the size of the project{\textquoteright}s development base, project age and the size of niche occupied by the project are positively related to the project{\textquoteright}s ability to attract user and/or developer resources. The ability to attract resources is an indicator of the perceived project legitimacy, which in turn is a strong predictor of the project{\textquoteright}s future sustainability. Thus a project{\textquoteright}s ability to attract developer and user resources is shown to play a mediating role between the demographic (size and age) and ecological (niche) characteristics of the project and its future sustainability. Our results support the applicability of tenets of organizational ecology related to the liability of smallness, the liability of newness, and population characteristics (niche size) to the FLOSS development environment. The implications of the results for future research and practice are discussed.}, keywords = {contribution, developers, sourceforge, sustainability}, url = {http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol11/iss11/5/}, author = {Chengular-Smith, I. and Sidorova, Anna and Daniel, Sherae L.} } @conference {1259, title = {Towards an Openness Rating System for Open Source Software}, booktitle = {2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2010)}, year = {2010}, pages = {1 - 8}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Honolulu, Hawaii, USA}, abstract = {Many open source software projects are not very open to third party developers. The point of open source is to enable anyone to fix bugs or add desired capabilities without holding them hostage to the original developers. This principle is important because an open source project{\textquoteright}s developers may be unresponsive or unable to meet third party needs, even if funding support for requested improvements is offered.This paper presents a simple rating system for evaluating the openness of software distributions. The rating system considers factors such as platform portability, documentation, licensing, and contribution policy. Several popular open source products are rated in order to illustrate the efficacy of the rating system.}, keywords = {alice, case study, contribution, documentation, freespire, galib, latex, license, linux, linux kernel, mediaportal, openness, openoffice, opensolaris, rating, unicon}, isbn = {978-1-4244-5509-6}, doi = {10.1109/HICSS.2010.405}, attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/10-07-04.pdf}, author = {Bein, Wolfgang and Jeffery, Clinton} } @article {1232, title = {Integration of libre software applications to create a collaborative work platform for researchers at GET}, journal = {International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering}, volume = {1}, number = {3}, year = {2006}, month = {07/2006}, pages = {1-16}, publisher = {IGI Global}, abstract = {Libre software provides powerful applications ready to be integrated for the build-up of platforms for internal use in organizations. We describe the architecture of the collaborative work platform which we have integrated, designed for researchers at GET. We present the elements we have learned during this project in particular with respect to contribution to external libre projects, in order to better ensure the maintainability of the internal applications, and to phpGroupware as a framework for specific applications development.}, keywords = {collaborative work environment, contribution, free software, groupware, in-house applications, libre software, open source software, OpenLDAP, phpGroupware, PicoLibre, ProGET, Sympa, TWiki, WebDAV, wiki}, author = {Olivier Berger and Christian Bac and Benoit Hamet} }