A Framework to Abstract The Design Practices of e-Learning System Projects - Corbiere, Alain (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
The use of ALT (Advanced Learning Technologies) creates dynamic sharing and exchanging between open source communities that diffuse e-learning systems. In our opinion, the designer practices define new perspectives on e-learning design which are not structured and highlighted enough. This article shows the capabilities of a generic framework to analyse the design practices on a open source project and to explicit these practices. We describe how the semantics for architectural specifications proposed by RM-ODP (Reference Model-Open Distributed Process) framework were applied on an e-learning system project to analyse the principles of invariants, structural and functional.

Geographic origin of libre software developers - Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona; Gregorio Robles; Roberto Andradas-Izquierdo; Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (Information Economics and Policy, 2008)
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

Getting Clear About Communities in Open Innovation - Joel West; Lakhani, Karim (Industry & Innovation, 2008)

Governance in Open Source Software Development Projects: Towards a Model for Network-Centric Edge Organizations - Walt Scacchi; Chris Jensen (13th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, 2008)

Guest Editorial of the Special Issue on Socio-technical Dynamics in the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Social World - Yu-wei Lin; Lars Risan (2008)
This special issue is the first volume in academia dedicated to a qualitative inquiry on dynamics in the FLOSS development and implementation, even if it is not alone in this endeavour (see e.g., Coleman, 2004; Kelty, 2005). Such a qualitative inquiry challenges the universally vocal and normative way of depicting FLOSS culture and practices (e.g., a homogeneous gift-giving and volunteering culture). The special issue encourages a practice-based and holistic view to exploring multiple cultures and practices in developing, localising, appropriating, and customising FLOSS. It also addresses the diversity in FLOSS communities through asking how seemingly global FLOSS cultures are translated into different contexts and locales. The importance of such an emphasis on how FLOSS technologies and practices diffract as they travel is nicely encapsulated by Haraway (1992) in her optic metaphor of white light that diffracts through a prism and becomes a rainbow. In light of this metaphor, a piece of FLOSS software is never really the same; when reproduced and shared, it is both the same (the standard) and something else in the mean time.

Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism - Coleman, E.G.; Golub, A. (Anthropological Theory, 2008)

How Do Firms Make Use of Open Source Communities? - Linus Dahlander; M Magnusson (Long Range Planning, 2008)
Relying on four in-depth case studies of firms involved with open source software, we investigate how firms make use of open source communities, and how that use is associated with their business models. Three themes - accessing, aligning and assimilating -are inductively developed for how the firms relate to the external knowledge created in the communities. For each theme, we make an argument about the tactics associated with each theme and their positive and negative consequences. The findings are related to the literature on the open and distributed nature of innovation, and various theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.
Keywords: case study; cendio; email; mailing list; mysql; roxen; secondary data; sot

I’m not chatting, i’m innovating! locating lead users in open source software communities - Breach, Geoff (University of Technology, Sydney School of Management Working Paper Series, 2008)
The Lead User Method recognizes that certain end users of products are a valuable source – in some industries the only source – of new product innovations. Organizations that seek out these lead users and invite them to assist with the new product development process will produce products that perform far better in the marketplace than those developed by traditional methods based on research and development and market research. The individuals who author Open Source Software (OSS) – complex and high-quality computer software that is typically distributed free of charge and without restrictions on use – appear to share many common characteristics with lead users. These skilled computer programmers develop their software collaboratively, and often form large communities that congregate in Internet 'chat rooms' to discuss and manage their software development projects. In response to a call for further research to improve the performance of the lead user method, this paper integrates concepts from the fields of innovation management, data visualization and open source software to a proposal to improve the process of identifying lead users in OSS communities
Keywords: irc

Improving change descriptions with change contexts - Parnin, Chris; Görg, Carsten (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
Software archives are one of the best sources available to researchers for understanding the software development process. However, much detective work is still necessary in order to unravel the software development story. During this process, researchers must isolate changes and follow their trails over time. In support of this analysis, several research tools have provided different representations for connecting the many changes extracted from software archives. Most of these tools are based on textual analysis of source code and use line-based differencing between software versions. This approach limits the ability to process changes structurally resulting in less concise and comparable items. Adoption of structure-based approaches have been hampered by complex implementations and overly verbose change descriptions. We present a technique for expressing changes that is fine-grained but preserves some structural aspects. The structural information itself may not have changed, but instead provides a context for interpreting the change. This in turn, enables more relevant and concise descriptions in terms of software types and programming activities. We apply our technique to common challenges that researchers face, and then we discuss and compare our results with other techniques.
Keywords: bytecode analysis; cecil; change management; change pairs; semantic diff; zedgraph

Improving community awareness in software forges by semantical aggregation of tools feeds - Quang Vu Dang; Christian Bac; Olivier Berger; Xuan Sang Dao (3nd International Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2008), Milano, Italy, September 2008, 2008)
It is rather difficult to monitor or visualize what can be the contribution of a member in a project, especially when the project uses multiple tools to produce its results. This is the case for collaborative development of FLOSS software, that use Wiki, bug tracker, mailing lists and source code management tools. This paper presents an approach to data collection by using aggregation of feeds published by the different tools of a software forge. To allow this aggregation, collected data is semantically reformatted into Semantic Web standards: RDF, DC, DOAP, and FOAF. Resulting data can then be processed, republished or displayed to project members. We implemented this approach in a supervision module that has been integrated into the PicoForge platform. This module is able do draw a live graph of the social community out of the different sources of data, and in turn export semantic feeds for other uses.
Keywords: community of practice; DOAF.; FOAF; free and open source software development; public data; RDF; semantic Web; social filtering; social network analysis

The indirect debate and the community. How the periphery and the core relate in the Free/Open Source Software community - Francesco Rullani (DRUID conference 2008 paper, 2008)
The present paper analyzes the relationship between the core and the periphery in the Free/Open Source innovation model. Considering the core as the "sparring partner" of the periphery, and not vice versa, the present discussion tries to apply a view opposite to the most diffused one. The first passages of the paper are meant to characterize the periphery, its functions, and the source of the realized division of labor with the core. It is shown that this specific schema is the consequence of the self-organizing nature of the FOSS model, that needs to dissipate resources to assure that the whole dynamics does not cease. However, this peculiar division of labor is possible only if the periphery and the core share the same set of interpretative schemes, norms and vision of the authoritative configuration of the community. To understand how this last passage is possible, I develop a conceptual model based on Wenger's concept of imagination and alignment, usually kept in the background by the literature on FOSS, and on the idea of dissonance (e.g. Kuran, 1998). Eventually, the paper tries discuss the relevant properties of the periphery (invisibility, atomization and instability) emerging from the analysis of the possible flaws of the process

Infrastructures From the Bottom-Up and the Top-Down: Can They Meet in the Middle? - Twidale, M.B; Floyd, I.R. (Proceedings PDC 2008, 2008)
Based on a study of participatory design in the development of cyberinfrastructure involving the rapid composition of open source software and web services, we consider cases where researchers create their own ad hoc infrastructures out of available software. We compare "top- down" and "bottom-up" cyberinfrastructure development and speculate on whether the two approaches can be productively combined.

Infrastructures From the Bottom-Up and the Top-Down: Can They Meet in the Middle? - Twidale, M.B; Floyd, I.R. (Proceedings Participatory Design Conference 2008, 2008)
Based on a study of participatory design in the development of cyberinfrastructure involving the rapid composition of open source software and web services, we consider cases where researchers create their own ad hoc infrastructures out of available software. We compare "top- down" and "bottom-up" cyberinfrastructure development and speculate on whether the two approaches can be productively combined.

An initial study of the growth of eclipse defects - Zhang, Hongyu (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
We analyze the Eclipse defect data from June 2004 to November 2007, and find that the growth of the number of defects can be well modeled by polynomial functions. Furthermore, we can predict the number of future Eclipse defects based on the nature of defect growth.
Keywords: bug reports; defect growth model; defect prediction; eclipse; msr challenge; polynomial regression

The institutions of open source software: Examining the Debian community☆ - Mateos Garcia, J.; Steinmueller, W.E. (Information Economics and Policy, 2008)
Free and open source software activities involve and, perhaps, evolve institutions (rules, norms and standards) that influence the formation, growth, and demise of communities. Community institutions are attractors for some individuals while discouraging other individuals from entering or continuing to participate. Their suitability may change as a community grows. This paper examines the institutions of the Debian community where issues of community identity, distribution of authority, and decentralisation have facilitated growth and development. These same institutions have also resulted in conflicts regarding community purposes and the quality and delivery of the community’s output. We examine the institutional redesign undertaken to address these problems and derive implications for F/LOS communities and companies.
Keywords: authority; COMMUNITY; conflict; debian; decentralization; growth; institutions; leadership

Intellectual Property Rights and Ex-Post Transaction Costs: the Case of Open and Closed Source Software - von Engelhardt, Sebastian (2008)
The economic characteristics of software and transaction costs explain, why closed source and open source software co-exist. It is about the efficient use of a non- and anti-scarce resource. But because of ex-post transaction costs that lead to information asymmetries, some property rights regarding the resource ""source code"" are not exclusively separable. Thus, the first best allocation of property rights, that would yield an optimal usage of a source code, is not realizable. Or, that is to say, a first best realization of contracts is not feasible. Hence, open and closed source software are two second best arrangements, both with specific assets and drawbacks. The principle of closed source benefits from direct (monetary) incentives and control, but has limits in its scope (size) because of transaction costs. Open source, on the one hand, benefits from its openness that creates spillovers and enables to incorporate human capital that is not acquirable for closed source firms. On the other hand, there are costs of openness, such as coordination costs (consensus finding, etc.) the danger of free riding or under provision, or forking.

Involving Software Engineering Students in Open Source Software Projects: Experiences from a Pilot Study - Sowe, Sulayman K.; Ioannis Stamelos (2008)
Anecdotal and research evidences show that the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) development model has produced a paradigm shift in the way we develop, support, and distribute software. This shift is not only redefining the software industry but also the way we teach and learn in our software engineering (SE) courses. But for many universities F/OSS is seen as an optional low cost technology to support the IT infrastructure and administrational duties. Few see F/OSS as an opportunity for students to learn the SE concepts and skills we teach. Furthermore, it is still an open question as to whether the F/OSS methodology can be effectively used to teach SE courses within the formally structured curriculum in most universities. This paper discusses F/OSS projects as bazaars of learning that offer a meaningful learning context. The discussion is centered on a pilot study in which students were involved in software testing in F/OSS projects. We present the teaching and learning framework we used in the pilot study and report on our experiences, lessons learned, and some practical problems we encountered. Our grading and evaluation approach show that the students did relatively well as bug hunters and reporters. Results from two online surveys indicate that students are motivated in participating in software testing in the bazaar, and they are willing to participate in project activities long after their graduation. The study reveals one possible way SE educators can teach and integrate F/OSS into their formal curricular structure.

JADE: A software framework for developing multi-agent applications. Lessons learned - Bellifemine, F.; Caire, G.; Poggi, A.; Rimassa, G. (Information and Software Technology, 2008)
Since a number of years agent technology is considered one of the most innovative technologies for the development of distributed software systems. While not yet a mainstream approach in software engineering at large, a lot of work on agent technology has been done, many research results and applications have been presented, and some software products exists which have moved from the research community to the industrial community. One of these is JADE, a software framework that facilitates development of interoperable intelligent multi-agent systems and that is distributed under an Open Source License. JADE is a very mature product, used by a heterogeneous community of users both in research activities and in industrial applications. This paper presents JADE and its technological components together with a discussion of the possible reasons for its success and lessons learned from the somewhat detached perspective possible nine years after its inception. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A large-scale study of MySpace: Observations and implications for online social networks - James Caverle; Steve Webb (International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2008), 2008)

Latent Social Structure in Open Source Projects - Christian Bird; David Pattison; Raissa D'Souza; Filkov, Vladimir; Devanbu, Premkumar (SIGSOFT '08/FSE-16: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, 2008)
Commercial software project managers design project organizational structure carefully, mindful of available skills, division of labour, geographical boundaries, etc. These organizational “cathedrals” are to be contrasted with the "bazaar-like" nature of Open Source Software (OSS) Projects, which have no pre-designed organizational structure. Any structure that exists is dynamic, self-organizing, latent, and usually not explicitly stated. Still, in large, complex, successful, OSS projects, we do expect that subcommunities will form spontaneously within the developer teams. Studying these subcommunities, and their behavior can shed light on how successful OSS projects self-organize. This phenomenon could well hold important lessons for how commercial software teams might be organized. Building on known well-established techniques for detecting community structure in complex networks, we extract and study latent subcommunities from the email social network of several projects: Apache HTTPD, Python, PostgresSQL, Perl, and Apache ANT. We then validate them with software development activity history. Our results show that subcommunities do indeed spontaneously arise within these projects as the projects evolve. These subcommunities manifest most strongly in technical discussions, and are significantly connected with collaboration behaviour.

Licensing Freedom; An Ethical Analysis of Free and Open Source Software Licenses - Saskia van de Nieuwenhof (2008)
Free and open source software enables users to use, read and modify the source code of computer programs. In proprietary software, access to the source code is not given and users are generally not permitted to use, read and modify the source code. Opponents of a proprietary system state that proprietary software is morally wrong and in this thesis, the arguments they use are evaluated.Several licensing schemes can be used as an addition to copyright law to give users the rights described above. The most important division between these different licenses can be made on the basis of the use of the copyleft principle. This principle obliges the licensee to distribute modified versions of the software under the same, or similar terms as the original license. In this thesis, this obligation is seen as a restriction on the freedom of the individual. Comparisons and possible justifications will give better insight in this supposed contradiction.

Lost and Gained in Translation: Adoption of Open Source Software Development at Hewlett-Packard - Melian, Catharina; Mähring, Magnus (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
What happens when an organization form that has emerged in one context is brought into a different context? In this paper, a longitudinal field study approach is used to explore how Hewlett-Packard (HP) molded open source software development (OSSD) into a proprietary software development approach called “Progressive Open Source” (POS). With the help of actornetwork theory, we understand this as a process of translation and find that some central characteristics of OSSD where lost in the translation into POS while other characteristics were gained.

Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities - Jan Fredrik Stoveland (2008)
The interest and use of open source software and methodology has gained an increasing amount of commercial attention, and we are currently witnessing that established proprietary software firms are taking a step further by opening their own software projects in an attempt to create firm-sponsored open source communities. Siobhan O'Mahony's research finds that these firms have to handle a tension between openness and control in their product development, but little research has been done to detail how this balance is achieved. I have studied the American software company Novell and the openSUSE project, largely guided by an inductive, qualitative approach supplemented by some quantitative methods. In the study I draw upon Niklas Luhmann's theory of autopoietic social systems to create a distinction between the sponsor firm and the sponsored community, and I investigate the mechanisms that hold the two systems together despite their differences in interests. I argue that there are several elements that ensure a tight coupling between the two systems, including the boundary objects situated between them, the shared communication channels and the efforts of the marginal people whom have roles in both systems. A primary contribution to the theory of boundary objects is a distinction between what I describe as supportive-objects and target-objects. I argue that the latter holds a strong motivating power that should be appended to our understanding of individuals' and collectives' motivation to participate in open source software projects. I explore several possible future scenarios for the evolution of firm-sponsored communities, and find that Novell is pursuing a strategy for managing openness in such a community.

Mapping Linux Security Targets to Existing Test Suites - Ardagna, C.; Damiani, E.; Ioini, N.; Frati, F.; Giovannini, P.; Tchokpon, R. (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
The Common Criteria standard provides an infrastructure for evaluating security functions of IT products and for certifying that security policies claimed by product suppliers are correctly enforced by the security functions themselves. Certifying Open Source software (OSS) can pave the way to OSS adoption in a number of security-conscious application environments. Recent experiences in certifying Linux distributions has pointed out the problem of finding a mapping between descriptions of OSS security functions and existingtest suites developed independently, such as the Linux Test Project. In this paper, we describe a mechanism, based on matching techniques, which semiautomatically associates security functions to existing test suite such as the ones developed by Open Source communities.

The Material and Social Dynamics of Motivation: Contributions to Open Source Language Technology Development - Stephanie Freeman (Science Studies, 2008)
Volunteer motivation has been a central theme in Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) literature. This research has been largely dominated by economists who rely in their surveys on the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and the "hacker ethic" for profit juxtaposition. The paper argues that survey-based analytical frameworks and research designs have led to a focus on some motivational attributions at the expense of others. It then presents a case study that explores dynamic, non individualistic and content-sensitive aspects of motivations. The approach is based on socio-cultural psychology and the author's observations of a hybrid firm-community FLOSS project, OpenOffice.org. Instead of separating intrinsic motivations from extrinsic ones, it is argued that complex and changing patterns of motivations are tied to changing objects and personal histories prior to and during participation. The boundary between work and hobby in an individual's participation path is blurred and shifting.
Keywords: contributions; developers; email; email archives; mailing list; MOTIVATION; openoffice; openoffice.org; secondary data; Volunteers

Migration Discourse Structures: Escaping Microsoft’s Desktop Path - Dobusch, Leonhard (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Most studies of FOSS organizational migration projects focus solely on technological and economical aspects, neglecting the importance of organizational discourse structures for migration decisions as well as success. In looking at the case of the municipality of Munich this paper uses structuration theory in combination with discourse analysis to explain why and how in this case actors were able to overcome strong barriers to migration in the field of desktop software.

Mining for Practices in Community Collections: Finds From Simple Wikipedia - den Besten, Matthijs; Rossi, Alessandro; Gaio, Loris; Loubser, Max; Jean-Michel Dalle (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
The challenges of commons based peer production are usually associated with the development of complex software projects such as Linux and Apache. But the case of open content production should not be treated as a trivial one. For instance, while the task of maintaining a collection of encyclopedic articles might seem negligible compared to the one of keeping together a software system with its many modules and interdependencies, it still poses quite demanding problems. In this paper, we describe the methods and practices adopted by Simple Wikipedia to keep its articles easy to read. Based on measurements of article readability and similarity, we conclude that while the mechanisms adopted by the community had some effect, in the long run more efforts and new practices might be necessary in order to maintain an acceptable level of readability in the Simple Wikipedia collection.

Mining usage expertise from version archives - Schuler, David; Zimmermann, Thomas (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
In software development, there is an increasing need to find and connect developers with relevant expertise. Existing expertise recommendation systems are mostly based on variations of the Line 10 Rule: developers who changed a file most often have the most implementation expertise. In this paper, we introduce the concept of usage expertise, which manifests itself whenever developers are using functionality, e.g., by calling API methods. We present preliminary results for the ECLIPSE project that demonstrate that our technique allows to recommend experts for files with no or little history, identify developers with similar expertise, and measure the usage of API methods.
Keywords: api; computer-supported cooperative work; eclipse; expertise; recommendation; scm; software repository; source code

Mobilization of Software Developers: The Free Software Movement - Elliott, M.; Walt Scacchi ((revised version in) Information, Technology and People, 2008)

The motivational arc of massive virtual collaboration - Kevin Crowston; Isabelle Fagnot (IFIP WG 9.5, International Working Conference on Virtuality and Society: Massive Virtual Communities, 2008)
Massive virtual collaborations (MVC) involve large numbers of mostly unpaid contributors collectively creating new content. Wikipedia is the most dramatic example of MVC; smaller-scale examples include contributors to blogs and discussion groups and teams of programmers and users developing free/libre open source software (FLOSS). In this paper, we propose a model of motivations for contribution to MVC that integrates various theoretical perspectives. The model extends prior work by distinguishing three different levels of contribution to projects (initial, sustained and meta) and by capturing the dynamic and recursive effects of contributions on emergent individual and project states.

Movement Ideology vs. User Pragmatism in the Organizational Adoption of Open Source Software - Dedrick, Jason; Joel West (Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion: From Mainframes to Ubiquitous Computing, 2008)

The Networked Forge: New Environments for Libre Software Development - Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus; Martínez, Andrés; Polo, Alvaro; Hierro, Juan; Reyes, Marcos; Soriano, Javier; Fernández, Rafael (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Libre (free, open source) software forges (sites hosting the development infrastructure for a collection of projects) have been stable in architecture, services and concept since they become popular during the late 1990s. During this time several problems that cannot be solved without dramatic design changes have become evident. To overcome them, we propose a new concept, the “networked forge”, focused on addressing the core characteristics of libre software development and the needs of developers. The key of this proposal is to re-engineer forges as a net of distributed components which can be composed and configured according to the needs of users, using a combination of web 2.0, semantic web and mashup technologies. This approach is flexible enough to accommodate different development processes, while at the same time interoperates with current facilities.

A newbie's guide to eclipse APIs - Holmes, Reid; Walker, Robert J. (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
Eclipse has evolved from a fledgling Java IDE into a mature software ecosystem. One of the greatest benefits Eclipse provides developers is flexibility; however, this is not without cost. New Eclipse developers often find the framework to be large and confusing. Determining which parts of the framework they should be using can be a difficult task as Eclipse documentation tends to be either very high-level, focusing on the design of the framework, or low-level, focusing on specific APIs. We have developed a tool called PopCon that provides a bridge between high-level design documentation and low-level API documentation by statically analyzing a framework and several of its clients and providing a ranked list of the relative popularity of its APIs. We have applied PopCon to the Eclipse framework for this challenge to help newbie Eclipse developers identify some of the most relevant APIs for their tasks.
Keywords: API popularity; documentation; eclipse; mining software repositories; module; msr challenge; PopCon; popularity

The Open and Closed Styles of Talent Acquisition and Management: Which takes an edge where - Rahul Kala (2008)
The phenomenal success of Free/Open Source Software during the recent years has led researchers in all related fields to re-think and re-evaluate the studies and concepts, especially those which the open source violates. Talent management and talent acquisition is no exception to this. The sudden rise in open source projects and their success is a cause of motivation for all of us to evaluate their philosophy and implement the same. Proper talent management and acquisition of talent can play a key role in strengthening the industry. Traditional closed management with their classic way of functioning may still look at the open source model as a big mystery. Open source has violated many of the theories of Software Engineering like limited team size, decentralized project management, etc. The concepts of self-motivated individuals, adaptive division of labor, informal or indirect leadership, etc. are the contributions of the open source to the world. In this paper we discuss these concepts and state their differences with the way of working of closed talent management. Even though open source has various benefits in working, but requirement of a good coordination process, redundancy of development, versioning problems, etc. pose a limitation. We present an analogy of the talent management in the two concepts with that of the natural ecosystem. Talent in open source works in a manner similar to the ant colonies. Here the process is more community oriented and there is no single dictator power. The proprietary, on the other hand, works on talent as the lions ruling the den. There is a hierarchy and that needs to be respected. Only the leader has the right to make final decision, and that is binding. We also take a look into the present conditions of meltdown and show how the open source way is better suited for this scenario. Even though the present firms may be seeing a setback at this time of recession, the impact on firms with an open source way of working is much lighter or none at all. We also discuss the interactions between the two styles of talent management and present a model that can be adopted by the proprietary companies to benefit from open model. Our arguments of the paper not only deal with software, but also on content that comes under the domain of Creative Commons. We have taken the examples of Wikipedia, Sourceforge.net, Linux etc. for the various issues we discuss.

An Open Integrated Environment for Transparent Fuzzy Agents Design - Acampora, Giovanni; Loia, Vincenzo (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Recently, computational agents received significant attention in computer science research community. In fact, intelligent agents is a powerful artificial intelligence technology showing considerable promise as a new paradigm for mainstream software development and able to offer new ways of abstraction, decomposition, and organization that fit well with our natural view of the world. However, despite their promise, intelligent agents are still scarce in the market place. A key reason for this is that developing intelligent agent software requires significant training and skill. Artificial Intelligence methodologies and computer networking tools represent the necessary basic knowledge to design and implement advanced agents oriented systems. This papers introduces an integrated development environment supporting the agents developers to design fuzzy-based agents in a simple and fast way. Proposed framework has been realized by integration of theoretical methodologies as fuzzy logic and labeled tree, together with OSS tools as JaxMe2.

Open Source Environments for Collaborative Experiments in e-Science - Bosin, Andrea; Dessí, Nicoletta; Fugini, Maria; Liberati, Diego; Pes, Barbara (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Open Source Software (OSS) for e-Science should make reference to the paradigm of a distributed surrounding over a multi system mix of Web Services and Grid technologies, allowing data exchanging through services, according to standards in the area of the Grid and of Service Oriented Computing (SOC). In fact, biologists, medical doctors, and scientists are often involved in time consuming experiments and are aware of the degree of difficulty in validating or rejecting a given hypothesis by lab experiments. The benefits of OSS for e-Science consider that as many operating nodes as possible can work cooperatively sharing data, resources, and software, thus avoiding the bottleneck of licenses for distributed use of tools needed to perform cooperative scientific experiments. In particular, this chapter presents an architecture based on nodes equipped with a Grid and with Web Services in order to access OSS, showing how scientific experiments can be enacted through the use of a cooperation among OSS sites. Such a choice, besides reducing the cost of the experiments, would support distributed introduction of OSS among other actors of the dynamical networks, thus supporting the awareness about OSS and their diffusion. An OSS environment for cooperative scientific experiments (e-experiments) can effectively support the distributed execution of different classes of experiments, from visualization to model identification through clustering and rules generation, in various application fields, such as bioinformatics, neuro-informatics, tele-monitoring,or drug discovery. By applying Web Services and Grid computing, an experiment or a simulation can be executed in a cooperative way on various computation nodes of a network equipped with OSS, allowing data exchange among researchers. Our environment formalizes experiments as cooperative services on various computational nodes of a grid network. Basic elements are models, languages, and support tools creating a virtual network of organizational responsibility of the global experiments, according to rules under which each node can execute local services to be accessed by other nodes in order to achieve the whole experiment’s results.

Open Source Project Categorization Based on Growth Rate Analysis and Portfolio Planning Methods - Koch, Stefan; Stix, Volker (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
In this paper, we propose to arrive at an assessment and evaluation of open source projects based on an analysis of their growth rates in several aspects. These include code base, developer number, bug reports and downloads. Based on this analysis and assessment, a well-known portfolio planning method, the BCG matrix, is employed for arriving at a very broad classification of open source projects. While this approach naturally results in a loss of detailed information, a top-level categorization is in some domains necessary and of interest.

Open Source Reference Systems for Biometric Verification of Identity - Mayoue, Aurélien; Petrovska-Delacrétaz, Dijana (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
This paper focuses on the common evaluation framework which was developed by the BioSecure Network of Excellence during the European FP6 project BioSecure (Biometrics for Secure authentication). This framework, which is composed of open-source reference systems, publicly available databases, assessment protocols and benchmarking results, introduces a new experimental methodology for conducting, reporting and comparing experiments for biometric systems, participating to standardisation efforts. Its use will permit to make a link between different published works. It provides also the necessary tools to assure the reproducibility of the benchmarking biometric experiments. This framework can be considered as a re-liable and innovative process to evaluate the progress of research in the field of bio-metrics.

Open Source Software: Free Provision of a Complex Public Good - Jim Bessen (2008)
Open source software, developed by volunteers, appears counter to conventional wisdom about private provision of public goods. Standard arguments suggest that proprietary provision should be more efficient. But complex open source products challenge commercially-developed software in quality and market share. I argue that the complexity of software changes the results. With complex software, standard products cannot address all consumer needs and proprietary custom solutions are not always offered. Open source allows consumers to create their own customizations. When such user-customizations are then shared, open source products grow in quality and features. Open source extends the market for complex products.

Open Source Software: Free Provision of a Complex Public Good - Jim Bessen (2008)
Open source software, developed by volunteers, appears counter to conventional wisdom about private provision of public goods. Standard arguments suggest that proprietary provision should be more efficient. But complex open source products challenge commercially-developed software in quality and market share. I argue that the complexity of software changes the results. With complex software, standard products cannot address all consumer needs and proprietary custom solutions are not always offered. Open source allows consumers to create their own customizations. When such user-customizations are then shared, open source products grow in quality and features. Open source extends the market for complex products.

Open source software peer review practices: a case study of the apache server - Peter C. Rigby; Daniel M. German; Storey, Margaret-Anne (Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), 2008)
Peer review is seen as an important quality assurance mechanism in both industrial development and the open source software (OSS) community. The techniques for performing inspections have been well studied in industry; in OSS development, peer reviews are less well understood. We examine the two peer review techniques used by the successful, mature Apache server project: review-then-commit and commit-then-review. Using archival records of email discussion and version control repositories, we construct a series of metrics that produces measures similar to those used in traditional inspection experiments. Specifically, we measure the frequency of review, the level of participation in reviews, the size of the artifact under review, the calendar time to perform a review, and the number of reviews that find defects. We provide a comparison of the two Apache review techniques as well as a comparison of Apache review to inspection in an industrial project. We conclude that Apache reviews can be described as (1) early, frequent reviews (2) of small, independent, complete contributions (3) conducted asynchronously by a potentially large, but actually small, group of self-selected experts (4) leading to an efficient and effective peer review technique.
Keywords: apache; cvs; email; inspection; mining software repositories (email); open source software; peer review; version control

Open Source: The Next Big Thing In Technology Transfer to Developing Nations - Jamil Alkhatib; Mohab Anis; Hamid Noori (2008)
Free Open Source (FOS) should be one of the least expensive and most effective solutions for technology and knowledge transfer to developing nations. This concept has diffused to several fields such as software, hardware, and content. FOS offers not only a low cost alternative for technology acquisition, but also for networking based on cooperation. In addition, the transaction costs of communication, licensing and negotiations are minimized, freeing up funds for real development. In this paper, FOS incentives, indicators, and measures are explained and the advantages of FOS as a viable technology and knowledge transfer tool for developing countries are highlighted.

Open to Grok. How do Hackers’ Practices Produce Hackers? - D’Andrea, Vincenzo; De Paoli, Stefano; Teli, Maurizio (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
How do hackers’ practices produce hackers’ identities? In this paper we argue that the association between science fiction and software programs is rooted in hackers’ practices, defining how hackers’ knowledge’ emerge. The mediation is the one of the Heinlein verb “to grok”, part of the Jargon file and of the name of a code browser, OpenGrok, the technology mediating the relationship between OpenSolaris developers and the code base. Starting with a description of the peculiarity of the verb “to grok”, and its connection with a non-Cartesian view of knowledge, we discuss how the history of OpenGrok and its use by developers make this knowledge part of hackers’ practices and identities, as someone involved in a true, deep understanding of software.

Overview on Trust in Large FLOSS Communities - Petrinja, Etiel; Sillitti, Alberto; Succi, Giancarlo (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
The paper presents a survey of mature Free/Libre Open Source Software communities. The main focus of the survey is the collection of data related to the practices of these communities related to trust elements in their products. The survey is carried out using a structured questionnaire about thoughts and practices followed by Free/Libre Open Source Software communities. The survey focuses on the analysis of the development processes adopted by such communities. The results of the survey confirms basic ideas related to Free/Libre Open Source Software and explains in more detail specific issues related to trust and trustworthiness of the Free/Libre Open Source Software development process.

Panel: Opportunities and Risks for Open Source Software in Industry - Feller, Joseph; Lundell, Björn; Marttiin, Pentti; Walt Scacchi; Schellingerhout, Nico (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Open Source Software (OSS) is a multi-faceted phenomenon which has become an issue of strategic importance for many commercial organisations. Stemming from an ideological issue, with emphasis on freedom and community values, we have recently seen a broader interest in the Open Source phenomenon amongst practitioners in many companies. A number of SMEs and large companies are currently exploring the potential of Open Source, and for some it has become core to their business and development activities.

PhD Candidate Paper - Anita Say Chan (Science Studies, 2008)
National legislation to mandate the use or consideration of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) in government institutions is increasingly emerging as a strategy for FLOSS advocates in Latin America and the broader developing world. Such movements for the political use and regulation of FLOSS mark a distinct turn in the objectives and work of FLOSS advocates, whose activities largely focused on the dissemination of FLOSS as a technological artifact. This paper investigates the network of diverse actors involved in promoting FLOSS legislation in Peru, one of the first nations where a movement for FLOSS legislation emerged. It emphasizes that crucial to the work of FLOSS' network actors is not their merely technological productivity, but their cultural and political productivity - that is, their ability to produce diverse body of meaning made both evident and mobile in narratives of FLOSS use and adoption.

PMLite: An Open Source Solution for Process Monitoring - Colombo, Alberto; Damiani, Ernesto; Frati, Fulvio (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Process Monitoring represents a big challenge for organizations that aim to manage software projects adopting different development paradigms. In fact, across-process enterprise-level measurement campaigns can be difficult to enact since process attributes to retrieve are semantically diverse and may be difficult to integrate. In this paper, we present PMLite (Process Monitoring Lite) an open source solution to this problem. PMLite is based on an open metamodel and paves the way to the definition of ad-hoc open monitoring frameworks.

Power through brokering: open source community participation in software engineering student projects - Krogstie, Birgit R. (Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering, 2008)
Many software engineering projects use open source software tools or components. The project team's active participation in the open source community may be necessary for the team to use the technology. Based on an in-depth field study of industry software engineering project students interacting with an open source community, we find that participation in the community may affect the team's work and learning by strengthening the power of the broker between the team and the community. We outline pitfalls and benefits of having student teams acquire development-related knowledge from open source communities. The findings are relevant to the organization and supervision of software engineering student projects interacting with open source communities.
Keywords: Communities Of Practice; computer science education; FLOSS; open source; software engineering; software engineering education

Preparing the Ne(x)t Generation: Lessons learnt from Free/Libre Open Source Software and their Communities - Andreas Meiszner; Rüdige Glott; Sowe, Sulayman K. (2008)
In this article, the authors Andreas Meiszner, RÃ¼diger Glott and Sulayaman K. Sowe, examine the lessons that can be learnt from the Free / Libre Open and Source Software (FLOSS) communities. FLOSS communities, as good practice examples of Open Participatory Learning Ecosystems, illustrate possible pathways for higher education to go beyond the limits of the current Open Educational Resource move.

Promoting the Penguin: Who is Advocating Open Source Software in Commercial Settings? - Oliver Alexy; Joachim Henkel (Working Paper, 2008)
Most firms that use or develop software today face the questions of whether and how to engage in open source software (OSS). Yet, little is known about the process of OSS adoption and diffusion within corporations. Guided by the models of Rogers (innovation diffusion) and Davis (Technology Acceptance Model), we develop a theoretical framework of how job function influences individuals? proclivity to support their employers? adoption of OSS and OSS practices. We argue that job function determines an individual?s tasks, and that different tasks are differentially affected by OSS. Our study is based on interviews and a large-scale survey in a multinational corporation. Distinguishing between developers, testers, software architects, project managers, and managers, we find greater engagement in OSS to be favored most strongly by testers. Excepting project managers, developers, despite having the most experience with OSS, are the least favorably disposed to greater corporate OSS engagement. A corporation interested in adopting OSS should thus take into account the job function-related incentives of each individual. More generally, we propose that models predicting IT adoption behavior be extended to account for the ways in which individual adopters interact with the innovation at hand, which will be determined largely by their job functions.

Reflection on Knowledge Sharing in F/OSS Projects - Sowe, Sulayman; Ioannis Stamelos (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Knowledge sharing between software project participants simplifies a range of decision-making processes and helps improve the way software is being developed, distributed, and supported. However, research in this area has traditionally been very difficult because the source of knowledge, the code, has been a guarded secret and software developers and users inhabit different worlds. F/OSS projects have changed the way we perceive and understand knowledge sharing in distributed software development. This short paper presents our current understanding, and what needs to be done in terms of empirical research in knowledge sharing in F/OSS projects.

On the relation of refactorings and software defect prediction - Sigmund, Thomas; Gall, Harald C.; Ratzinger, Jacek (Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Mining software repositories - MSR '08, 2008)
This paper analyzes the influence of evolution activities such as refactoring on software defects. In a case study of five open source projects we used attributes of software evolution to predict defects in time periods of six months. We use versioning and issue tracking systems to extract 110 data mining features, which are separated into refactoring and non-refactoring related features. These features are used as input into classification algorithms that create prediction models for software defects. We found out that refactoring related features as well as non-refactoring related features lead to high quality prediction models. Additionally, we discovered that refactorings and defects have an inverse correlation: The number of software defects decreases, if the number of refactorings increased in the preceding time period. As a result, refactoring should be a significant part of both bug fixes and other evolutionary changes to reduce software defects.
Keywords: argouml; bug fixing; bug reports; defects; evolution; jboss; liferay; prediction; refactoring; spring; weka; xdoclet

Relationship between size, effort, duration and number of contributors in large FLOSS projects - Ramil, J.F.; Izquierdo-Cortázar, Daniel; Mens, Tom (7th BElgian-NEtherlands software eVOLution workshop - BENEVOL 2008, 2008)
This contribution presents initial results in the study of the relationship between size, effort, duration and number of contributors in eleven evolving Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, in the range from approx. 650,000 to 5,300,000 lines of code. Our initial motivation was to estimate how much effort is involved in achieving a large FLOSS system. Software cost estimation for proprietary projects has been an active area of study for many years (e.g. [1][2][3]). However, to our knowledge, no previous similar research has been conducted in FLOSS effort estimation. This research can help planning the evolution of future FLOSS projects and in comparing them with proprietary systems. Companies that are actively developing FLOSS may benefit from such estimates [4]. Such estimates may also help to identify the productivity ’baseline’ for evaluating improvements in process, methods and tools for FLOSS evolution

Replication of FLOSS Research as eResearch - Andrea Wiggins; James Howison; Kevin Crowston (Oxford e-Research Conference 2008, 2008)
We are working to introduce the ideas of eResearch to a multi-disciplinary research domain: those researchers examining Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and its development (Howison, Wiggins, & Crowston, 2008).The first phase of this work focused on building a repository for data on FLOSS teams, FLOSSmole (Howison, Conklin, & Crowston, 2006), and collaborating with other nascent data repositories in the field. Recently we have begun a second phase, which is to introduce another established principle of eResearch, that of broader collaboration through shared workflows accessing these data repositories. To provide an example of the potential value of this principle, we are replicating seminal FLOSS papers using eResearch approaches. This paper describes research outcomes and lessons learned from translating published literature into eResearch workflows.
Keywords: eResearch eScience

Report on the effectiveness of a FLOSS-like learning community in formal educational settings - Martin J. Weller; Andreas Meiszner; Sowe, Sulayman K.; Athanasis Karoulis (2008)
This report examines some of the pedagogic principles embodied in Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities and briefly looks at case studies of FLOSS-like approaches in education. It analyzes and evaluates the differences between Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities as informal learning environments and on the other side formal educational settings. The report also point out ways on transferring those FLOSS principles to formal educational settings and looks at existing examples of eLearning delivery and examines why these do not provide the types of constructivist learning environments as observed in FLOSS communities.

Requirements Acquisition in Open Source Development: Firefox 2.0 - Noll, John (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Open Source Software Development appears to depart radically from conventional notions of software engineering. In particular, requirements for Open Source projects seem to be asserted rather than elicited. This paper examines features of the latest major release of the Firefox web browser in attempt to understand how prevalent this phenomenon is. Using archives of mailing lists and issue tracking databases, these features were traced from first mention to release, to determine the process by which requirements are proposed, adopted, and implemented in Firefox. The results confirm the importance of user participation as developers of open source products.

The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities - Joel West; Siobhan O'Mahony (Industry & Innovation, 2008)

Self-organization process in open-source software: An empirical study - Yu, Liguo (Information and Software Technology, 2008)
Software systems must continually evolve to adapt to new functional requirements or quality requirements to remain competitive in the marketplace. However, different software systems follow different strategies to evolve, affecting both the release plan and the quality of these systems. In this paper, software evolution is considered as a self-organization process and the difference between closed-source software and open-source software is discussed in terms of self-organization. In particular, an empirical study of the evolution of Linux from version 2.4.0 to version 2.6.13 is reported. The study shows how open-source software systems self-organize to adapt to functional requirements and quality requirements.
Keywords: Empirical study; evolution; linux; requirements; Self-organization; software evolution

Slouching toward Open Innovation: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for Electronic Health Information - Greg R Vetter (2008)
The potential for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to enable open innovation in a particular software market depends on the characteristics of that market. From this premise, using a case study approach, this Article argues that some software markets have characteristics that inherently disfavor initiating or expanding the use of FOSS and its unique mode of licensing the intellectual property that underlies software. The case study involves software to manage health information for hospitals or physician groups in the form of the electronic medical record, or EMR. Proprietary software venders supply most of the products for this software market. Recently, the U.S. government undertook experimental steps to promote a FOSS package for EMR, raising the question as to whether the EMR software market is amenable to FOSS. This Article describes various factors that might signal a FOSS disfavoring market, including low technical aptitude among users, differences among users in their work flow and software interface needs, users with dispassionate computing agendas, and entrenched proprietary competitors in an area supporting minimal complementary goods or services. FOSS, however, might be able to overcome these impedances in a particular software market if its unique motivational mix is strong enough. This Article describes potential facilitators to support this possibility. One such facilitator, specifically for the EMR market, but perhaps generally for other markets, may be safe harbors for FOSS development within any relevant anti-collaboration and anti-tinkering laws. Licensing facilitators include emphasizing approaches such as dual licensing or promoting FOSS contributions by contractors engaged by users. This Article concludes by mentioning potential non-licensing facilitators to augment the FOSS motivational mix for markets that might disfavor it.

Small patches get in! - Weißgerber, Peter; Neu, Daniel; Diehl, Stephan (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
While there is a considerable amount of research on analyzing the change information stored in software repositories, only few researcher have looked at software changes contained in email archives in form of patches. In this paper we look at the email archives of two open source projects and answer questions like the following: How many emails contain patches? How long does it take for a patch to be accepted? Does the size of the patch influence its chances to be accepted or the duration until it gets accepted? Obviously, the answers to these questions can be helpful for the authors of patches, in particular because some of the answers are surprising.
Keywords: case study; cvs; email; email archives; flac; mailing list; openafs; patch acceptance; patches; revision control; scm

Social Dynamics of FLOSS Team Communication Across Channels - Andrea Wiggins; Howison, James; Kevin Crowston (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
This paper extends prior investigation into the social dynamics of free and open source (FLOSS) teams by examining the methodological questions arising from research using social network analysis on open source projects. We evaluate the validity of data sampling by examining dynamics of communication centralization, which vary across multiple communication channels. We also introduce a method for intensity-based smoothing in dynamic social network analysis.

Social Networking Technologies for Free-Open Source E-Learning Systems - Di Cerbo, Francesco; Dodero, Gabriella; Succi, Giancarlo (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
In this paper, we illustrate our methodology for academic teaching, based on cooperative learning paradigm, which also relies on cutting edge e-learning techniques. We use Web 2.0 resources to fulfill requirements for an interactive-constructivistic “learning space”, where blended-teaching paradigm may be proficiently applied. We extend an existing Free/Open Source Software Learning Management System, to create a cooperative and community-based learning space adherent to our proposal.

A socio-cognitive analysis of online design discussions in an Open Source Software community - Barcellini, Flore; Détienne, Françoise; Burkhardt, Jean-Marie; Warren Sack (Interacting with Computers, 2008)
This paper is an analysis of online discussions in an Open Source Software (OSS) design community, the Python project. Developers of Python are geographically distributed and work online asynchronously. The objective of our study is to understand and to model the dynamics of the OSS design process that takes place in mailing list exchanges. We develop a method to study distant and asynchronous collaborative design activity based on an analysis of quoting practices. We analyze and visualize three aspects of the online dynamics: social, thematic temporal, and design. We show that roles emerge during discussions according to the involvement and the position of the participants in the discussions and how they influence participation in the design discussions. In our analysis of the thematic temporal dynamics of discussion, we examine how themes of discussion emerge, diverge, and are refined over time. To understand the design dynamics, we perform a content analysis of messages exchanged between developers to reveal how the online discussions reflect the “work flow” of the project: it provides us with a picture of the collaborative design process in the OSS community. These combined results clarify how knowledge and artefacts are elaborated in this epistemic, exploration-oriented, OSS community. Finally, we outline the need to automate of our method to extend our results. The proposed automation could have implications for both researchers and participants in OSS communities.
Keywords: Role

SpotWeb: detecting framework hotspots via mining open source repositories on the web - Thummalapenta, Suresh; Xie, Tao (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
The essentials of modern software development (such as low cost and high efficiency) demand software developers to make intensive reuse of existing open source frameworks or libraries (generally referred as frameworks) available on the web. However, developers often face challenges in reusing these frameworks due to several factors such as the complexity and lack of proper documentation. In this paper, we propose a code-search-engine-based approach that tries to detect hotspots in a given framework by mining code examples gathered from open source repositories available on the web; these hotspots are the APIs that are frequently reused. Hotspots can serve as starting points for developers in understanding and reusing the given framework. We developed a tool, called SpotWeb, for frameworks or libraries written in Java and conducted two case studies with two open source frameworks JUnit and Log4j. We also show that the detected hotspots of Log4j and JUnit are consistent with their respective documentations.
Keywords: code reuse; code search engine; frameworks; hotspots; junit; log4j; repositories

The SQO-OSS Quality Model: Measurement Based Open Source Software Evaluation - Samoladas, Ioannis; Gousios, Georgios; Diomidis Spinellis; Ioannis Stamelos (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Software quality evaluation has always been an important part of software business. The quality evaluation process is usually based on hierarchical quality models that measure various aspects of software quality and deduce a characterization of the product quality being evaluated. The particular nature of open source software has rendered existing models inappropriate for detailed quality evaluations. In this paper, we present a hierarchical quality model that evaluates source code and community processes, based on automatic calculation of metric values and their correlation to a set of predefined quality profiles.1

A statistical framework for analyzing the duration of software projects - Sentas, P.; Lefteris Angelis; Ioannis Stamelos (Empirical Software Engineering, 2008)
The duration of a software project is a very important feature, closely related to its cost. Various methods and models have been proposed in order to predict not only the cost of a software project but also its duration. Since duration is essentially the random length of a time interval from a starting to a terminating event, in this paper we present a framework of statistical tools, appropriate for studying and modeling the distribution of the duration. The idea for our approach comes from the parallelism of duration to the life of an entity which is frequently studied in biostatistics by a certain statistical methodology known as survival analysis. This type of analysis offers great flexibility in modeling the duration and in computing various statistics useful for inference and estimation. As in any other statistical methodology, the approach is based on datasets of measurements on projects. However, one of the most important advantages is that we can use in our data information not only from completed projects, but also from ongoing projects. In this paper we present the general principles of the methodology for a comprehensive duration analysis and we also illustrate it with applications to known data sets. The analysis showed that duration is affected by various factors such as customer participation, use of tools, software logical complexity, user requirements volatility and staff tool skills.

Summarizing developer work history using time series segmentation: challenge report - Siy, Harvey; Chundi, Parvathi; Subramaniam, Mahadevan (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
Temporal segmentation partitions time series data with the intent of producing more homogeneous segments. It is a technique used to preprocess data so that subsequent time series analysis on individual segments can detect trends that may not be evident when performing time series analysis on the entire dataset. This technique allows data miners to partition a large dataset without making any assumption of periodicity or any other a priori knowledge of the dataset's features. We investigate the insights that can be gained from the application of time series segmentation to software version repositories. Software version repositories from large projects contain on the order of hundreds of thousands of timestamped entries or more. It is a continuing challenge to aggregate such data so that noise is reduced and important characteristics are brought out. In this paper, we present a way to summarize developer work history in terms of the files they have modified over time by segmenting the CVS change data of individual Eclipse developers. We show that the files they modify tends to change significantly over time though most of them tend to work within the same directories.
Keywords: contributions; cvs; developers; eclipse; msr challenge; temporal segmentation; time series; work history

A tale of four kernels - Diomidis Spinellis (Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering, 2008)
The FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating systems have kernels that provide comparable facilities. Interestingly, their code bases share almost no common parts, while their development processes vary dramatically. We analyze the source code of the four systems by collecting metrics in the areas of file organization, code structure, code style, the use of the C preprocessor, and data organization. The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many different metrics, four systems developed using wildly different processes score comparably. This allows us to posit that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.
Keywords: comparison; freebsd; linux; open source; opensolaris; proprietary software; windows; wrk

Talk and work: a preliminary report - Pattison, David S.; Bird, Christian A.; Premkumar T. Devanbu (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
Developers in Open Source Software (OSS) projects communicate using mailing lists. By convention, the mailing lists used only for task-related discussions, so they are primarily concerned with the software under development, and software process issues (releases, etc.). We focus on the discussions concerning the software, and study the frequency with which software entities (functions, methods, classes, etc) are mentioned in the mail. We find a strong, striking, cumulative relationship between this mention count in the email, and the number of times these entities are included in changes to the software. When we study the same phenomena over a series of time-intervals, the relationship is much less strong. This suggests some interesting avenues for future research.
Keywords: ant; apache; email; mailing lists; postgresql; python; scm; source code

To What Extent Does It Pay to Approach Open Source Software for a Big Telco Player? - Banzi, Massimo; Bruno, Guido; Caire, Giovanni (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
In this paper we describe the strategy under adoption in Telecom Italia (TI) Technology Department toward open source software. This stems from trying to create synergy among big Telco Player to increase knowledge and influence over strategic communities to the evaluation of the creation of new communities over internally developed applications. In particular here the approach and the expectations in starting the community on WADE (Workflow and Agent Development Environment) is described. This is a platform used to develop mission critical applications and is the main evolution of JADE a popular Open Source framework for the development of interoperable intelligent multi-agent systems. It adds to JADE the support for the execution of tasks defined according to the workflow metaphor as well as a number of mechanisms that help managing the complexity of the distribution both in terms of administration and fault tolerance. The idea is to use WADE as a mean to gather critical information on the opportunity of approaching OS as a strategic mean toward the development of always more important application in Operating Support System for TI, possibly also involving other great Telco Players For this reason great care is being paid in setting up the Community environment and in deciding which metrics are to be extracted from it, since the result will be the input for a strategic decision in TI.

The Total Growth of Open Source - Amit Deshpande; Dirk Riehle (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Software development is undergoing a major change away from a fully closed software process towards a process that incorporates open source software in products and services. Just how significant is that change? To answer this question we need to look at the overall growth of open source as well as its growth rate. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the growth of more than 5000 active and popular open source software projects. We show that the total amount of source code as well as the total number of open source projects is growing at an exponential rate. Previous research showed linear and quadratic growth in lines of source code of individual open source projects. Our work shows that open source is expanding into new domains and applications at an exponential rate.

Towards a Global Research Infrastructure for Multidisciplinary Study of Free/Open Source Software Development - Gasser, Les; Walt Scacchi (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
The Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) research community is growing across and within multiple disciplines. This community faces a new and unusual situation. The traditional difficulties of gathering enough empirical data have been replaced by issues of dealing with enormous amounts of freely available public data from many disparate sources (online discussion forums, source code directories, bug reports, OSS Web portals, etc.). Consequently, these data are being discovered, gathered, analyzed, and used to support multidisciplinary research. However at present, no means exist for assembling these data under common access points and frameworks for comparative, longitudinal, and collaborative research across disciplines. Gathering and maintaining large F/OSS data collections reliably and making them usable present several research challenges. For example, current projects usually rely on direct access to, and mining of raw data from groups that generate it, and both of these methods require unique effort for each new corpus, or even for updating existing corpora. In this paper, we identify several needs and critical factors in F/OSS empirical research across disciplines, and suggest recommendations for design of a global research infrastructure for multi-disciplinary research into F/OSS development.

Towards a Global Research Infrastructure for Multidisciplinary Study of Free/Open Source Software Development - Gasser, Les; Walt Scacchi (Open Source Development, Communities and Quality, 2008)

Towards a simplification of the bug report form in eclipse - Herraiz, Israel; Daniel M. German; Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona; Gregorio Robles (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
We believe that the bug report form of Eclipse contains too many fields, and that for some fields, there are too many options. In this MSR challenge report, we focus in the case of the severity field. That field contains seven different levels of severity. Some of them seem very similar, and it is hard to distinguish among them. Users assign severity, and developers give priority to the reports depending on their severity. However, if users can not distinguish well among the various severity options, they will probably assign different priorities to bugs that require the same priority. We study the mean time to close bugs reported in Eclipse, and how the severity assigned by users affects this time. The results shows that classifying by time to close, there are less clusters of bugs than levels of severity. We therefore conclude that there is a need to make a simpler bug report form.
Keywords: bug fixing; bug report; bug tracking system; classification; eclipse; msr challenge; severity

Towards The Evaluation of OSS Trustworthiness: Lessons Learned From The Observation of Relevant OSS Projects - Taibi, Davide; del Bianco, Vieri; Carbonare, Davide; Lavazza, Luigi; Morasca, Sandro (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
To facilitate the adoption of open-source software (OSS) in industry, it is important to provide potential users (i.e., those who could decide to adopt OSS) with the means for evaluating the trustworthiness of OS products. This paper presents part of the work done in the QualiPSo project for this purpose. A set of factors that are believed to affect the perception of trustworthiness are introduced. In order to test the feasibility of deriving a correct, complete and reliable evaluation of trustworthiness on the basis of these factors, a set of well-known OSS projects have been chosen. Then, the possibility to assess the proposed factors on each project was verified: not all the factors appear to be observable or measurable. The paper reports what information is available to support the evaluation and what is not. This knowledge is considered to be useful to users, who are warned that there are still dark areas in the characterization of OSS products, and to developers, who should provide more data and characteristics on their products in order to support their adoption.

Transition of governance in a mature open software source community: Evidence from the Debian case - Bert M. Sadowski; Gaby Sadowski-Rasters; Geert Duysters (Information Economics and Policy, 2008)
As open source software (OSS) communities mature, they have to introduce a variety of governance mechanisms to manage the participation of their members and to coordinate the launch of new releases. The Debian community introduced new mechanisms of informal administrative control based on a constitution, elected leaders, and used interactive communication channels. We show that these control mechanisms were introduced as a response to emerging innovative opportunities due to the usage of source packages and to the need to build a responsive organization within the Debian OSS community.
Keywords: debian; governance

Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software and the Internet - Christoper Kelty (Duke University Press, 2008)

Ubuntuism, Commodification, and the Software Dialectic. - Mike Chege (2008)
"Free as in speech, but not free as in beer," is the refrain made famous by Richard Stallman, the standard-bearer of the free software movement. However, many free software advocates seem to be of the opinion that the purity of free software is somehow tainted by any preoccupation with money or profit. Inevitably, this has implications for the economic sustainability of free software, for without a source of income, how can free software hope to survive? The challenge of finding a way to ensure economic sustainability without sacrificing the ideals of free software is what we have termed the "software dialectic.""While the literature on the economics of free software is already quite substantial, in this essay we approach the subject by considering first principles, such as the difference between wealth and money, how the market chooses what to produce, and what the laws of thermodynamics have to do with economics. Finally, even though the ideas expressed in this essay apply to free software in general, here we shall be focusing on that particular incarnation of free software known as the GNU/Linux system.

Understanding bug fix patterns in verilog - Sudakrishnan, Sangeetha; Madhavan, Janaki; Whitehead,Jr., E. James; Renau, Jose (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
Today, many electronic systems are developed using a hardware description language, a kind of software that can be converted into integrated circuits or programmable logic devices. Like traditional software projects, hardware projects have bugs, and significant developer time is spent fixing them. A useful first step toward reducing bugs in hardware is developing an understanding of the frequency of different types of errors. Once the most common types are known, it is then possible to focus attention on eliminating them. As most hardware projects use software configuration management repositories, these can be mined for the textual bug fix changes. In this project, we analyze the bug fix history of four hardware projects written in Verilog and manually define 25 bug fix patterns. The frequency of each bug type is then computed for all projects. We find that 29 -- 55% of the bug fix pattern instances in Verilog involve assignment statements, while 18 -- 25% are related to if statements.
Keywords: bug fixing; error classification; hdl; verilog; VHDL

Understanding knowledge sharing activities in free/open source software projects: An empirical study - Sowe, Sulayman K.; Ioannis Stamelos; Lefteris Angelis (Journal of Systems and Software, 2008)
Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects are people-oriented and knowledge intensive software development environments. Many researchers focused on mailing lists to study coding activities of software developers. How expert software developers interact with each other and with non-developers in the use of community products have received little attention. This paper discusses the altruistic sharing of knowledge between knowledge providers and knowledge seekers in the Developer and User mailing lists of the Debian project. We analyze the posting and replying activities of the participants by counting the number of email messages they posted to the lists and the number of replies they made to questions others posted. We found out that participants interact and share their knowledge a lot, their positing activity is fairly highly correlated with their replying activity, the characteristics of posting and replying activities are different for different kinds of lists, and the knowledge sharing activity of self-organizing Free/Open Source communities could best be explained in terms of what we called "Fractal Cubic Distribution" rather than the power-law distribution mostly reported in the literature. The paper also proposes what could be researched in knowledge sharing activities in F/OSS projects mailing list and for what purpose. The research findings add to ' our understanding of knowledge sharing activities in F/OSS projects. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords: debian; email; email archives; mailing list

Update Propagation Practices in Highly Reusable Open Source Components - Orsila, Heikki; Geldenhuys, Jaco; Ruokonen, Anna; Hammouda, Imed (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
In today’s business and software arena, more and more companies are adopting open source software. An example of this rising phenomenon is to base software products on highly reusable open source components. In this scenario, the evolution of the software product is coupled with the evolution of the open source component. A common assumption is that component updates are immediately and regularly propagated to the project. This paper investigates this assumption empirically by studying update propagation practices in two popular open source libraries, zlib and FFmpeg. For each library, we analyze various repository sources with information such as bug reports, revision history, and source code. The results of the case studies suggest that update propagation is subject to several technical and non-technical factors including the way the open source library is used, the extent to which updates are documented, and the degree of community involvement. Based on these findings, we propose a set of recommendations that would allow better follow-up of updates and smoother update propagation.

Usability in Company Open Source Software Context - Initial Findings from an Empirical Case Study - Iivari, Netta; Hedberg, Henrik; Kirves, Tanja (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
In the company open source software (OSS) development context, usability is becoming an important issue due to a growing user population, who is only interested in usable applications, not in their development. Companies try to gain a competitive advantage of OSS by utilizing available components, but the openness is difficult to achieve in the business world with licenses, patents and intellectual property rights. This paper analyses usability and user-interface (UI) development in the company OSS context through an interpretive case study in a software development unit of a large, global corporation. Our initial findings suggest that there is a need for human computer interaction specialists in the OSS context. It is revealed that with the software based on OSS, more time can be spent on usability and UI design. In the company’s viewpoint, there are still many issues involved in deciding what parts of the product will be open source. Especially UI code may remain closed due to competitive advantage and patents.

User and developer mediation in an Open Source Software community: Boundary spanning through cross participation in online discussions - Barcellini, Flore; Détienne, Françoise; Burkhardt, Jean-Marie (Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud., 2008)
The aim of this research is to analyse how design and use are mediated in Open Source Software (OSS) design. Focusing on the Python community, our study examines a ''pushed-by-users'' design proposal through the discussions occurring in two mailing-lists: one, user-oriented and the other, developer-oriented. To characterize the links between users and developers, we investigate the activities and references (knowledge sharing) performed by the contributors to these two mailing-lists. We found that the participation of users remains local to their community. However, several key participants act as boundary spanners between the user and the developer communities. This emerging role is characterized by cross-participation in parallel same-topic discussions in both mailing-lists, cohesion between cross-participants, the occupation of a central position in the social network linking users and developers, as well as active, distinctive and adapted contributions. The user championing the proposal acts as a key boundary spanner coordinating the process and using explicit linking strategies. We argue that OSS design may be considered as a form of ''role emerging design'', i.e. design organized and pushed through emerging roles and through a balance between these roles. The OSS communities seem to provide a suitable socio-technical environment to enable such role emergence.
Keywords: Boundary spanners; Cross-participants; Distributed design; Open Source Software Community; Role emerging design

Using Social Network Analysis Techniques to Study Collaboration between a FLOSS Community and a Company - Martinez-Romo, Juan; Gregorio Robles; Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus; Ortuño-Perez, Miguel (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Because of the sheer volume of information available in FLOSS repositories, simple analysis have to face the problems of filtering the relevant information. Hence, it is essential to apply methodologies that highlight that information for a given aspect of the project. In this paper, some techniques from the social sciences have been used on data from version control systems to extract information about the development process of FLOSS projects with the aim of highlighting several processes that occur in FLOSS projects and that are difficult to obtain by other means. In particular, the collaboration between the FLOSS community and a company has been studied by selecting two projects as case studies. The results highlight aspects such as efficiency in the development process, release management and leadership turnover.

What do large commits tell us?: a taxonomical study of large commits - Hindle, Abram; Daniel M. German; Holt, Ric (Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories, 2008)
Research in the mining of software repositories has frequently ignored commits that include a large number of files (we call these large commits). The main goal of this paper is to understand the rationale behind large commits, and if there is anything we can learn from them. To address this goal we performed a case study that included the manual classification of large commits of nine open source projects. The contributions include a taxonomy of large commits, which are grouped according to their intention. We contrast large commits against small commits and show that large commits are more perfective while small commits are more corrective. These large commits provide us with a window on the development practices of maintenance teams.
Keywords: boost; bug fixing; egroupware; enlightenment; evolution; firebird; large commits; maintenance; mysql; postgresql; samba; software evolution; source control system; spring

What dynamic network metrics can tell us about developer roles - Pohl, Mathias; Diehl, Stephan (Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering (CHASE '08), 2008)
Software development is heavily dependent on the participants of the process and their roles within the process. Each developer has his specific skills and interests and hence contributes to the project in a different way. While some programmers work on separate modules, others developers integrate these modules towards the final product. To identify such different groups of people one approach is to work with methods taken from social network analysis. To this end, a social network has to be defined in a suitable way, and appropriate analysis strategies have to be chosen. This paper shows how a network of software developers could be defined based on information in a software repository, and what it can possibly tell about roles of developers (and what not) in the process of the application server Tomcat.
Keywords: identifying roles; social network analysis

Willingness to Cooperate Within the Open Source Software Domain - Ravesteyn, Pascal; Silvius, Gilbert (OSS2008: Open Source Development, Communities and Quality (IFIP 2.13), 2008)
Open Source Software (OSS) is an increasingly hot topic in the business domain. One of the key benefits mentioned is the unlimited access to the source code, which enables large communities to continuously improve a software application and prevents vendor lock-in. How attractive these benefits may be, the market for OSS however remains limited. In the Netherlands research consisting of 7 interviews and a survey among 206 Open Source Software Service providers (with a 34% response rate) was done to determine whether service providers wanted to cooperate in an Association that will set quality levels and guarantees to its members and their customers.

1st International Workshop on Trust in Open Source Software (TOSS) - Morasca, Sandro; Sillitti, Alberto (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
The 1st International Workshop on Trust in Open Source Software (TOSS) focuses on one of the major factors in the adoption of software solutions: the trustworthiness of OSS, which has influenced the widespread adoption of OSS in industry. Software quality aspects have been investigated for a long time in the academia but the usage/production of OSS is creating new challenges and the points of view of the industry and the academia may differ, especially on the trustworthiness of OSS. The aim of the workshop is to open a communication channel between the industry and the academia focusing on this issue and promote a long lasting discussion on it. The workshop tries to identify the different points of views and the different approaches that can result in benefits for the software industry.

2nd International Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2007) - Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus; Conklin, Megan; Gregorio Robles (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Exchange of detailed data about software development between research teams, and specifically about data available from public repositories of libre (free, open source) software projects is becoming more and more common. This workshop will explore the benefits and problems of such exchange, and the steps needed to foster it. As a case example of data exchange, the workshop organizers suggest two large datasets to be analyzed by participants.

An Analysis of Involvement of HCI Experts in Distributed Software Development: Practical Issues - Görkem Çetin; Damiano Verzulli; Sandra Frings (2007)
Abstract. Traditionally, free and open source software (F/OSS) developers have focused more on the features of a specific application, most of the time ignoring the necessity of user-centric design. This has mainly stemmed from the fact that developers have little interaction with HCI studies, knowledge bases and reports. Moreover, the lack of user interface designers has resulted in a lack of awareness of this area. As a consequence, the user centric design phenomenon within F/OSS applications has been neglected. In this paper, we have mentioned various problems that would slow down a F/OSS project development towards a user-engineered software, and investigated the ways that HCI experts and developers interact with each other and researched bug reporting systems by means of eligibility to issue usability bugs. For the conclusion part, we have explored possible ways to achieve a user-centric design in a project with asynchronous interaction among geographically distributed developers.

Analysis of the Informal Learning Environment of FLOSS (Free / Libre Open Source Software) Communities - Rüdige Glott; Andreas Meiszner; Sowe, Sulayman K. (2007)
The general concept behind Free/Libre/Open Source Software (henceforth FLOSS) is making the source code of software accessible to anyone who wants to obtain it. Binaries or executables are available via the Internet and can be 'freely' downloaded and used. Prolific licensing agreements such as the General Public License (GPL) define the rights users have over the product. In the literature, many terms are in use to describe the FLOSS phenomenon. Notably, Free Software (FS), a term used by Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Open Source Software (OSS) used by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). In addition, Free Open Source Software (FOSS), Libre Software (LS), and Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) are terms frequently used by researchers. In this report the term FLOSS is used to refer to users??? freedom to use, modify, distribute, or even sell the software with little obligations as in propriety or closed source software. When a user modifies the software, he/she can either choose to keep changes made private or altruistically return them to the FLOSS community so that everyone can benefit from his derived work. FLOSS development did not begin with the inception of the Linux operating system, in 1991. Rather, the concept existed since the formation of SHARE ??? a working group set up to coordinate the programming work of the IBM 701, in 1952 (Sowe, 2007b). In the academic environment, software development and distribution among researchers and departments is not new, and goes back to the earliest days of software in university environments when software was developed to solve practical problems and could be freely shared. However, what is now true is that FLOSS has fundamentally changed the way we develop and distribute software. Enable by the Internet, geographically distributed individuals voluntarily contribute to a project by means of the Bazaar model (Raymond, 1999). Extensive peer collaboration allows project participants to write code, debug, test, and integrate software. Communities in various projects provide support services such as suggestions for products features, act as distributing organs, answer queries, help new members having problems with the software. FLOSS development not only exemplifies a viable software development approach, but also a model for the creation of self-learning and self-organizing communities (Sowe, et al. 2006c). FLOSS is also a virtual learning context in which both professional software developers and novice users benefit by leveraging their knowledge and information access repertoire. The context enable them to participate at their own convenience and learn (coding or other software related task) at their own pace (Sowe, et al. 2005; page 297). Furthermore, learners can conclude on the learning scope themselves (what to do) and decide on the method of acquiring the knowledge (how to do it). Knowledge acquisition is accomplished, for example, by having access to a large code-base, studying online documentation, asking more experienced members for assistance. In essence knowledge is acquired in FLOSS through learning by doing, which represents the drill-and-practice approach in normal constructivist environments. However, the FLOSS virtual learning context is not without its downside. Apart from physical isolation and detachment from face-to-face interaction commonly associated with virtual learning environments, learning in FLOSS requires access to Internet and moderate computer facilities. In addition, a high degree of computer literacy, reading, writing, and typing is required to participate effectively. The environment is also not conflict free. Flaming, the feeling of being ignored in a dominant discussion, disinterestedness, long delays in receiving responses from communities, the expenditure of searching through discussion archives to see issues previously raised in the communities, access rights to participate in some community activities are all major concerns in the management of the FLOSS learning context (Sowe, et al. 2005). In recent times, FLOSS is making inroads not only in business and software industries but in colleges and universities as well. There is increased interest in the FLOSS learning environment (Sowe, et al., 2004; Bacon and Dillion, 2006) and in FLOSS projects as bazaars of learning (Sowe, et al., 2006). As Faber (2002) noted, FLOSS is both an alternative teaching methodology and an educational model. The main objective of FLOSSCom is using the principles of informal learning environments of FLOSS communities to improve Information and Communication Technology (ICT) supported formal education. Despite the influence and popularity of FLOSS and the benefit inherent in its methodology, educational institutions have been slow to adapt. This can partly due to the fact that the FLOSS environment is fundamentally different from the formal learning environment in most institutions. The focus of this report is collate and report on the learning activities of individuals in various FLOSS communities. The report benefits from the experiences and expositions of various authors in order to provide a synergy and a fresh look into the learning environment of FLOSS communities. FLOSS communities, like other online communities (e.g. Community of Practice (CoPs)) have many interrelated elements that define the dynamics of the community. As such, this report is divided into 5 major sections, each focusing on a specific aspect of the learning environment of FLOSS communities with a 6th section summarizing the main findings. Section 1: The first part of the report is an introduction to FLOSS. The historical account of FLOSS is presented together with the many meanings of the term. This is followed by the demographic distribution of FLOSS participants and an explanation of what FLOSS communities are. Section 2: The next chapter examines the role of learning and knowledge exchange within the FLOSS community. It includes a description of the composition and roles of members within communities and what motivates various groups of individuals to participate in FLOSS. Section 3: After clarifying the role of learning in the FLOSS community the next chapter focuses on the content of learning processes in FLOSS. This chapter examines both, what skills are learnt and how the skills learnt within the FLOSS community are evaluated. The latter aspect is considered from the perspective of FLOSS community members as well as from the perspective of employers. Section 4: The fourth chapter examines how learning is organized within the FLOSS community. It examines the interaction between community members with regard to learning processes, the learning resources (except for technological resources) that are available and used within FLOSS communities, and the concrete learning processes. Section 5: This section looks at the technological resources used within FLOSS communities. FLOSS projects are almost exclusively administered online and one of the most important prerequisites for their coordination and cooperation is provided by the functionality of various communication and groupware tools. Section 6: The last section of the report proposes the project???s approach to learning in FLOSS. A preliminary set of guidelines as they apply to the principles of informal learning environments of FLOSS communities to improve ICT supported formal education are offered. These preliminary guidelines will be continuously amended in the following phase of the FLOSSCom project.

Analysis of the Linux Kernel Evolution Using Code Clone Coverage - Livieri, Simone; Higo, Yoshiki; Matsushita, Makoto; Inoue, Katsuro (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
Most studies of the evolution of software systems are based on the comparison of simple software metrics. In this paper, we present our preliminary investigation of the evolution of the Linux kernel using code-clone analysis and the code-clone coverage metrics. We examined 136 versions of the stable Linux kernel using a distributed extension of the code clone detection tool CCFinder. The result is shown as a heat map.
Keywords: ccfinder; clone; cloning; kernel; linux; metrics; source code

Authenticating from multiple authentication sources in a collaborative platform - Quang Vu Dang; Olivier Berger; Christian Bac; Hamet, Benoît (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
This paper presents a proposal to address the need for multiple authentication sources for users of collaborative work platforms. The proposed approach, developed for the needs of GET and Picolibre, relies on a generic solution that integrate groupware servers in a Shibboleth infrastructure. We have developed adapters for this integration, that we contributed to the phpGroupware project. This document should serve as a basis for discussion in order to validate the level of generality of the proposed approach. We hope that this approach can also help maintainers of other collaboration platforms, who want to integrate a park of deployed platforms with external user identification and authentication services, get a better view of solutions available with Shibboleth.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Open Source Software: An Exploratory Study of Secondary Software Firms - Morgan, Lorraine; Finnegan, Patrick (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Much of the assessment of OSS benefits and drawbacks has been based on anecdotal evidence appearing in practitioner publications, white papers, web articles etc. To a greater extent this research has tended to concentrate more on the technical benefits and drawbacks of OSS rather than their business counterparts. Furthermore, public administrations and companies operating within the primary software sector have traditionally been the focus for research on OSS benefits and drawbacks. Taking the viewpoint of IS/IT managers in 13 companies operating in the secondary software sector in Europe, this paper examines their experiences of the benefits/drawbacks of OSS.

Business models in FLOSS-based companies - Carlo Daffara (2007)
The sustainability of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) has recently become an important aspect of the overall open source phenomenon, and as such has received a significant research attention. Since 1999, several articles addressed the role of licenses, communities and business models in FLOSS-based companies, but mostly from a theoretical point of view. In this article, we present the result of a detailed analysis of 80 FLOSS-based companies and business models, using publicly available data on service offers, mailing list archives, online articles and when available public financial data. The result is a simplified and effective classification that can be used as a guide to companies willing to offer services in the same area, and an analysis on how the community process is influenced by the choice of licensing and business model.

Can Knowledge Management be Open Source? - Pfaff, Charmaine; Hasan, Helen (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
As we move further into a knowledge economy where collaboration and innovation are increasingly central to organisational effectiveness, enterprises need to pay more attention to the informal networks that exist within the organisation. Wikis may provide a more appropriate knowledge management capability and environment to capture tacit knowledge. Where traditional organisational cultures see that knowledge management must be tightly protected, Wikis opt for an open source approach where knowledge is shared and distributed for innovation to continue. This paper aims to explicate more participatory organisational processes of creation, accumulation and maintenance of knowledge. It uses Activity Theory as a framework to describe the components of an activity system where a Wiki is a tool mediating employee-based knowledge management activities and thereby democratising organisational knowledge.

Community Structure, Individual Participation and the Social Construction of Merit - Studer, Matthias (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
FLOSS communities are often described as meritocracies. We consider merit as a social construction that structures the community as a whole by allocating prestige to its participants on the basis of what they do. It implies a hierarchy of the different activities (web maintenance, writing code, bug report...) within the project. We present a study based on the merging of two datasets. We analyze the archive of KDE mailing lists using a social network. We also use responses to a questionnaire of KDE participants. Results bring empirical evidences showing that this hierarchy structures the community of KDE by allocating more central position to participants with more prestigious activities. We also show that this hierarchy structures individuals participation by giving greater “membership esteem” to members involved in more prestigious activities.

Comparing Approaches to Mining Source Code for Call-Usage Patterns - Kagdi, Huzefa; Collard, Michael L.; Maletic, Jonathan I. (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
Two approaches for mining function-call usage patterns from source code are compared. The first approach, itemset mining, has recently been applied to this problem. The other approach, sequential-pattern mining, has not been previously applied to this problem. Here, a call-usage pattern is a composition of function calls that occur in a function definition. Both approaches look for frequently occurring patterns that represent standard usage of functions and identify possible errors. Itemset mining produces unordered patterns, i.e., sets of function calls, whereas, sequential-pattern mining produces partially ordered patterns, i.e., sequences of function calls. The trade-off between the additional ordering context given by sequential-pattern mining and the efficiency of itemset mining is investigated. The two approaches are applied to the Linux kernel v2.6.14 and results show that mining ordered patterns is worth the additional cost.
Keywords: function calls; functions; kernel; linux; sequence; sequencing; sequential-pattern mining

Context-Dependent Evaluation Methodology for Open Source Software - Cabano, Michele; Monti, Cesare; Piancastelli, Giulio (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Many evaluation methodologies have been proposed to mitigate the risks of choosing Open Source Software as an effective solution to an enterprise’s problem. This work extracts the shared traits from the most important and widely known evaluation models, and re-applies them to create a new methodology. This methodology has been designed both to be used for the creation of a common knowledge base, and to be specialized for application in the context of the particular breed of small and medium-size enterprises found on the Italian ground.

Corporate Involvement of Libre Software: Study of Presence in Debian Code over Time - Gregorio Robles; Dueñas, Santiago; Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Although much of the research on the libre (free, open source) phenomenon has been focused on the involvement of volunteers, the role of companies is also important in many projects. In fact, during the last years, the involvement of companies in the libre software world seems to be raising. In this paper we present an study that shows, quantitatively, how important this involvement is in the production of the largest collection of code available for Linux: the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. By studying copyright attributions in source code, we have identified those companies with more attributed code, and the trend of corporate presence in Debian from 1998 to 2004.

Correlating Social Interactions to Release History during Software Evolution - Baysal, Olga; Malton, Andrew J. (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
In this paper, we propose a method to reason about the nature of software changes by mining and correlating discussion archives. We employ an information retrieval approach to find correlation between source code change history and history of social interactions surrounding these changes. We apply our correlation method on two software systems, LSEdit and Apache Ant. The results of these exploratory case studies demonstrate the evidence of similarity between the content of free-form text emails among developers and the actual modifications in the code. We identify a set of correlation patterns between discussion and changed code vocabularies and discover that some releases referred to as minor should instead fall under the major category. These patterns can be used to give estimations about the type of a change and time needed to implement it.
Keywords: ant; apache; change management; developers; discussion; effort estimation; lsedit; mailing lists; scm; source code

Correlating temporal communication patterns of the Eclipse open source community with performance and creativity - Kidane, Yared; Gloor, Peter (Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory, 2007)
This paper studies the temporal communication patterns of online communities of developers and users of the open source Eclipse Java development environment. It measures the productivity of each community and seeks to identify correlations that exist between group communication characteristics and productivity attributes. The study uses the TeCFlow (Temporal Communication Flow) visualizer to create movie maps of the knowledge flow by analyzing the publicly accessible Eclipse developer mailing lists as an approximation of the social networks of developers and users. Thirty-three different Eclipse communities discussing development and use of components of Eclipse such as the Java Development Tools, the different platform components, the C/C++ Development Tools and the AspectJ extension have been analyzed over a period of six months. The temporal evolution of social network variables such as betweenness centrality, density, contribution index, and degree have been computed and plotted. Productivity of each development group is measured in terms of two indices, namely performance and creativity. Performance of a group is defined as the ratio of new bugs submitted compared with bugs fixed within the same period of time. Creativity is calculated as a function of new features proposed and implemented. Preliminary results indicate that there is a correlation between attributes of social networks such as density and betweenness centrality and group productivity measures in an open source development community. We also find a positive correlation between changes over time in betweenness centrality and creativity, and a negative correlation between changes in betweenness centrality and performance.
Keywords: bug fixing; bugs; bugzilla; communication; creativity; developers; eclipse; email; email archives; feature requests; mailing lists; performance; productivity

Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia - Reid Priedhorsky; Jilin Chen; Shyong K. Lam; Katherine Panciera; Loren Terveen; John Riedl (Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2007)

The Creation of the Entrepreneurial Spirit and the Formation Of Alliances With Africa - Jabulani Mzaliya (2007)
The paper argues that there are internal governance problems within the African polity which need to be resolved before a successful creation of entrepreneurial alliances between Africa and the rest of the world. It also argues that past issues such as colonialism and imperialism pale into insignificance particularly among the new generation if they observe the absence of ethics among the current political leadership in the continent. There is also some discussion about the need for the developed world, notwithstanding the internal continental problems, to brush up its act in relation to the formation of alliances in Africa. Finally the paper argues the formation of alliances with Africa should not be limited to the traditioanl alliance partners of Europe and the America, but be flexible enough to allow new entrants such as China and India.

Data and analyses sharing to support research on free/libre open source software (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Research on FLOSS has relied on several different kinds of scientific evidence, such as the archives created by the FLOSS developers, versioned code repositories, mailing list messages and bug and issue tracking repositories [1]. FLOSS teams retain and make public archives of many of their activities as by-products of their open technology-supported collaboration. However, the easy availability of primary data provides a misleading picture of ease of conducting research on FLOSS. Precisely because these data are by-products, they are generally not in a form that is useful for researchers. Instead potentially useful data is locked up in HTML pages, CVS log files, text-only mailing list archives or dumps of website databases. FLOSS research projects, therefore, expend significant energy collecting and re-structuring these archives for their research, which is repetitive and wasteful [2]. Furthermore, different researchers will extract different data at different points in time, take different approaches to processing and cleaning data and make different decisions about analyses, but without all of these decisions being visible, auditable or reproducible. In principle, these latter problems can be addressed by individual researchers better documenting what they have done. However, research publications typically have restrictions on publication lengths that make complete discussion impossible. Furthermore, published papers are just the tip of the iceberg, and knowing what others have done does not necessarily make it any easier to replicate the results.

Design architecture, developer networks and performance of open source software projects - Xiang Liu; Bala Iyer (International Conference on Information Systems, 2007)
Keywords: NotreDameArchive

Detecting Patch Submission and Acceptance in OSS Projects - Christian Bird; Gourley, Alex; Devanbu, Prem (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
The success of open source software (OSS) is completely dependent on the work of volunteers who contribute their time and talents. The submission of patches is the major way that participants outside of the core group of developers make contributions. We argue that the process of patch submission and acceptance into the codebase is an important piece of the open source puzzle and that the use of patch-related data can be helpful in understanding how OSS projects work. We present our methods in identifying the submission and acceptance of patches and give results and evaluation in applying these methods to the Apache webserver, Python interpreter, Postgres SQL database, and (with limitations) MySQL database projects. In addition, we present valuable ways in which this data has been and can be used.
Keywords: apache; contributions; mysql; patches; postgresql; python; scm; source code

Determining Implementation Expertise from Bug Reports - Anvik, John; Murphy, Gail C. (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
As developers work on a software product they accumulate expertise, including expertise about the code base of the software product. We call this type of expertise "implementation expertise". Knowing the set of developers who have implementation expertise for a software product has many important uses. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of two approaches to determining implementation expertise from the data in source and bug repositories. The expertise sets created by the approaches are compared to those provided by experts and evaluated using the measures of precision and recall. We found that both approaches are good at finding all of the appropriate developers, although they vary in how many false positives are returned.
Keywords: bug reports; developers; eclipse; expertise; repository; scm; source code

Different Bug Fixing Regimes? A Preliminary Case for Superbugs - Jean-Michel Dalle; den Besten, Matthijs (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
The paper investigates the processes by which bugs are fixed in open-source software projects. Focusing on Mozilla and combining data from both its bug tracker (Bugzilla) and from its CVS, we suggest that: a) Some bugs resist beyond the first patch applied to the main branch of the source code in relation to them, which we denote as superbugs; b) There might exist different bug fixing regimes; c) priority and severity flags as defined in bug repositories are not optimized for superbugs and might lead to a involuntary side effects; d) The survival time of superbugs is influenced by the nature of the discussions within Bugzilla, by bug dependencies and by the provision of contextual elements.

Do firms take part in the projects of the OS community. Some preliminary evidence and a research agenda - Andrea Bonaccorsi; Dario Lorenzi; Monica Merito; Cristina Rossi (2007)
The Open Source (OS) software has progressively gained economic importance in recent years, and more and more commercial firms are getting involved, to various extents, in the OS movement. While a number of studies have investigated motivations and business models of OS-based software companies, very few works have examined whether and how firms actively participate to open projects. This paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the role and the activities of software houses in community developed projects. The research also proposes an original methodology of large-scale primary data collection from OS project repositories and linked Web sites. The findings show how different today???s OS movement is from its origins and how important firm involvement has become, not only numerically but also for the deepness of its impact on community projects. Finally, further research developments are suggested.

Dragging developers towards the core. How the Free/Libre/Open Source Software community enhances developers' contribution - Francesco Rullani (2007)
The paper presents a dynamic perspective on the landscape of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) developers' motivations and tries to isolate mechanisms sustaining developers' contribution over time. The first part of the paper uses data gathered by the empirical studies relative to the FLOSS case to judge the relative importance of each group of incentives detected by the literature. In the second part of the paper, the same data are used to further characterize developers' motivations in dynamics terms, showing how the relative importance of different incentives changes over time. Drawing inspiration from these results, the third part of the paper identifies a specific mechanism fostering developers' contribution to the community activities, namely that: "Independently of developers' exogenous preferences, the more their exposure to the FLOSS community social environment, the more their contribution to the community activities". The key point of this hypothesis is that, if the exposure to the FLOSS community social environment is able to foster developers' contribution beyond the level granted by their predetermined preferences, this leads directly to the evidence that the FLOSS community is provided with a mechanism sustaining and enhancing developers' incentives to produce and diffuse code. In the last part of the paper, data relative to 14,497 developers working on SourceForge.net during two years (2001-2002) are employed to estimate a model testing the aforementioned hypothesis. Endogeneity problems are explicitly accounted for, and robustness checks are performed in order to make sure that the observed confirmation of the hypothesis is actually an empirically grounded result.

Dual Licensing in Open Source Software Markets - Stefano Comino; Fabio M. Manenti (2007)
Dual licensing has proved to be a sustainable business model for various commercial software vendors employing open source strategies. In this paper we study the main characteristics of dual licensing and under which conditions it represents a profitable commercial strategy. We show that dual licensing is a form of versioning, whereby the software vendor uses the open source licensing terms in order to induce commercial customers to select the proprietary version of the software. Furthermore, we show that the software vendor prefers dual licensing to a fully proprietary strategy when the customers are very sensitive to the reciprocal terms of the open source license.

An Economic Model of Open Source Software Adoption - Si Chen (2007)
This paper examines the competitive strengths of open source versus commercial software from an economic perspective. It uses a simple model of rational software selection to derive the competitive strengths of open source and commercial software models, how they can balance each other, and what the threshold or tipping point for mass adoption of open source software would be. It shows that open source software has the advantage when their commercial competitors have excessively high profit margins or when the software product???s features are not scalable due to heterogeneous user requirements.

The Economic Motivation of Open Source: Stakeholder Perspectives - Dirk Riehle (2007)
Open source software has changed the rules of the game, impacting significantly the economic behavior of stakeholders in the software ecosystem. In this new environment, developers strive to be committers, vendors feel pressure to produce open source products, and system integrators anticipate boosting profits.

EDOS Distribution System: a P2P architecture for open-source content dissemination - Abiteboul, Serge; Dar, Itay; Pop, Radu; Vasile, Gabriel; Vodislav, Dan (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
The open-source software communities currently face an increasing complexity of managing the software content among theirs developers and contributors. This is mainly due to the continuously growing size of the software, the high frequency of the updates, and the heterogeneity of the participants. We propose a distribution system that tackles two main issues in the software content management: efficient content dissemination through a P2P system architecture, and advanced information system capabilities, using a distributed index for resource location.

EDOS-Tools Tutorial: EDOS Tools for Linux Distributions Dependencies Management and Quality Assurance - Déchelle, François; Mancinelli, Fabio (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) distributions are the results of the effort of third party actors in collecting independently developed software products, in a consistent and usable form. The widespread adoption of these distributions as infrastructural components in many strategic contexts of the information technology society has drawn the attention on the issues regarding how to handle the complexity of assembling and managing a huge number of (packaged) components and how to guarantee their quality. This tutorial will describe how the EDOS project has tackled these issues. First it will describe the problems related to the quality assurance of Linux distributions and will present the tools that have been developed to manage testing process. It will then introduce the problems that occur when managing inter-package relations in large package repositories and will showcase tools that can be used to analyze and manage large package repositories.

Effect of Coupling on Defect Proneness in Evolutionary Open-Source Software Development - Günes Koru, A.; Zhang, Dongsong; Liu, Hongfang (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Previous research on closed-source software found that highly coupled software modules were more defect prone, which makes it important to understand the effect of coupling on defect proneness in open-source software (OSS) projects. For this purpose, we used Cox proportional hazards modeling with recurrent events. We found that the effect of coupling was significant, and we quantified this effect on defect proneness.

Emergent Decision-Making Practices in Free/Libre Open Source Software (Floss) Development Teams - Robert Heckman; Kevin Crowston; Eseryel, U.; Howison, James; Eileen Allen; Li, Qing (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
We seek to identify work practices that make Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams effective. Particularly important to team effectiveness is decision making. In this paper, we report on an inductive qualitative analysis of 360 decision episodes of six FLOSS development teams. Our analysis revealed diversity in decision-making practices that seem to be related to differences in overall team characteristics and effectiveness.

Emerging Free and Open Source Software PracticesVolunteers in Large Libre Software Projects - Gregorio Robles; González-Barahona, Jesús M.; Martin Michlmayr (Emerging Free and Open Source Software Practices, 2007)
Most libre (free, open source) software projects rely on the work of volunteers. Therefore, attracting people who contribute their time and technical skills is of paramount importance, both in technical and economic terms. This reliance on volunteers leads to some fundamental management challenges: Volunteer contributions are inherently difficult to predict, plan, and manage, especially in the case of large projects. In this chapter we present an analysis of the evolution over time of the human resources in large libre software projects, using the Debian project, one of the largest and most complex libre software projects based mainly in voluntary work, as a case study. We have performed a quantitative investigation of data corresponding to roughly seven years, studying how volunteer involvement has affected the software released by the project, and the developer community itself.

EMOS/1: An Evolution Metrics Model for Open Source Software - Yi Wang; Defeng Guo (2007)
Open Source Software (OSS) has become the subject of much commercial and academic interest of last. Providing quantitative metrics for OSS evolution has also become an urgent issue. However, most existing studies of software evolution have been performed on systems developed within a single company using traditional management techniques. These metrics models are not suitable for measuring OSS evolution. In this paper, we designed a preliminary evolution metrics model named EMOS/1 which contains a set of new metrics defined for evaluating OSS specially. The most significant novelty of this model is that it takes some properties of Open Source Community (OSC) into consideration. In another word, we measure the evolution of OSS and OSC together. We also provide a lightweight case study on Ubuntu project using EMOS/1. We find out the Open Source Community and its members also play essential role in OSS evolution. We expect our model can bring better understandings and explanations of phenomena in open source development and evolution.

An Empirical Investigation of Code Contribution, Communication Participation and Release Strategies in Open Source Software Development: A Conditional Hazard Model Approach - Param Vir Singh; Ming Fan; Yong Tan (2007)
This study uses data from over 200 open source software (OSS) projects hosted at Sourceforge to empirically examine how OSS development characteristics affect project progress. Consistent with prior studies, we find that core developers (i.e., top 20 % of the most contributing developers) develop about 80% of the code. We also find that a group of developers that is about 50% larger than the core group is responsible for 80% of the communication. On average, the top 30% developers contribute about 81% of the messages. It is observed that projects with a clearly identified core group of developers conducting most of the coding are more efficient for project progress. We also find that highly participative peripheral group in communication positively affects project progress. In addition, high level of communication interactivity, measured by the number of email threads and average thread depth, enables a project to progress well. Our results also show that projects that draw upon the larger OSS community for beta testing progress faster. We find that the projects that do not progress well are associated with the following major factors: (i) lack of a core developer group, (ii) dormant peripheral group in communication, (iii) low communication interactivity exemplified by the lack of depth in threaded communications, and (iv) over-dependence on internal community for beta testing.

Evaluating the Harmfulness of Cloning: A Change Based Experiment - Lozano, Angela; Wermelinger, Michel; Nuseibeh, Bashar (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
Cloning is considered a harmful practice for software maintenance because it requires consistent changes of the entities that share a cloned fragment. However this claim has not been refuted or confirmed empirically. Therefore, we have developed a prototype tool, CloneTracker, in order to study the rate of change of applications containing clones. This paper describes CloneTracker and illustrates its preliminary application on a case study.
Keywords: ccfinder; clone; clones; clonetracker; cloning; ctags; cvs; dnsjava; maintenance; scm; source code

Experiences on Product Development with Open Source Software - Jaaksi, Ari (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
This article discusses Nokia’s experiences of using open source in commercial product development. It presents the development model used in the creation of mobile consumer devices and highlights the opportunities and challenges experienced. This article concludes that the main benefits come from the utilization of already available open source components, and from their quality and flexibility. It illustrates the challenges and solutions faced when mixing open and closed development models at Nokia.
Keywords: gtk; linux; nokia; tablet

Exploring the Effects of Coordination and Communication Tools on the Efficiency of Open Source Projects using Data Envelopment Analysis - Koch, Stefan (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
In this paper, we propose to explore possible benefits of communication and coordination tools in open source projects using data envelopment analysis (DEA), a general method for efficiency comparisons. DEA offers several advantages: It is a non-parametric optimization method without any need for the user to define any relations between different factors or a production function, can account for economies or diseconwhile omies of scale, and is able to deal with multi-input, multi-output systems in which the factors have different scales. Using a data set of 30 open source project retrieved from SourceForge.net, we demonstrate the application of DEA, showing that the efficiency of the projects is in general relatively high. Regarding the effects of tool employment on the efficiency of projects, the results were surprising: Most of the possible tools, and overall usage, showed a negative relationship to efficiency.
Keywords: metadata; sourceforge

FOCSE: An OWA-based Evaluation Framework for OS Adoption in Critical Environments - Ardagna, Claudio; Damiani, Ernesto; Frati, Fulvio (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
While the vast majority of European and US companies increasingly use open source software for non-key applications, a much smaller number of companies have deployed it in critical areas such as security and access control. This is partly due to residual difficulties in performing and documenting the selection process of open source solutions. In this paper we describe the FOCSE metrics framework, supporting a specific selection process for security-related open source code. FOCSE is based on a set of general purpose metrics suitable for evaluating open source frameworks in general; however, it includes some specific metrics expressing security solutions’ capability of responding to continuous change in threats. We show FOCSE at work in two use cases about selecting two different types of security-related open source solutions, i.e. Single Sign-On and Secure Shell applications.

Forecasting the Number of Changes in Eclipse Using Time Series Analysis - Herraiz, Israel; Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona; Gregorio Robles (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
In order to predict the number of changes in the following months for the project Eclipse, we have applied a statistical (non-explanatory) model based on time series analysis. We have obtained the monthly number of changes in the CVS repository of Eclipse, using the CVSAnalY tool. The input to our model was the filtered series of the number of changes per month, and the output was the number of changes per month for the next three months. Then we aggregated the results of the three months to obtain the total number of changes in the given period in the challenge.
Keywords: change management; cvs; cvsanaly; eclipse; prediction

FOSLET 07 — Workshop on Free and Open Source Learning Environments and Tools - Botturi, Luca; Mazza, Riccardo; Tardini, Stefano (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Web-based Learning Environments supported by Course Management Systems (also known as Learning Management Systems) are nowadays a valid solution for institutions, companies, schools and universities that deliver eLearning or support blended-learning activities. Learning Environments are used to distribute information and content material to learners, prepare and deliver assignments and tests, engage in discussions, and manage distance classes without time and space restrictions.

Free/libre open source software implementation in schools: Evidence from the field and implications for the future - Yu-wei Lin; Enrico Zini (2007)
This empirical paper shows how free/libre open source software (FLOSS) contributes to mutual and collaborative learning in an educational environment. Unlike proprietary software, FLOSS allows extensive customisation of software to support the needs of local users better. This also allows users to participate more proactively in the development and implementation process of a FLOSS-based system. In this paper, we observes how implementing FLOSS in an Italian high school challenges the conventional relationship between end users themselves (e.g. teachers and students) and that between users and developers. The findings will shed some light on the social aspects of FLOSS-based computerization - including the role of FLOSS in social and organizational change in educational environments and the ways that the social organization of FLOSS are influenced by social forces and social practices.

Free/Open Services: Conceptualization, Classification, and Commercialization - Gangadharan, G.; D’Andrea, Vincenzo; Weiss, Michael (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
The concept of Free/Open Services (F/O-Services) emerges by bringing together services with Free/Open Source Software (FOSS). F/O-Services enable the creation of transparent composite services collectively and allow people and other services to access them. This paper extends the concept of F/O-Services beyond the level of open interfaces, analyzing the associated licensing interpretations and exploring the notion of open service dependencies. Further, the paper overviews the business models for F/O-Services as a part of this social mechanism of exchange.

Free/Open Source Software Adoption, Public Policies and Development Indicators: An International Comparison - Schmidbauer, Harald; Gençer, Mehmet; Tunalıo_lu, Vehbi (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Despite the growing body of research on the inner workings of FOSS development, there are few studies on its relation with broader developments in society. In this study we have attempted a preliminary investigation of (1) how FOSS prevalence is related to economic and human development indicators of countries, (2) whether public policies regarding FOSS emerge in a consistent relation with these indicators in several clusters of countries constructed from the United Nation’s human development index, and (3) the relation of software piracy to development indicators. Our results point to relative significance of non-economic factors in FOSS adoption, lack of consistent policies among public agencies, and irrelevance of non-economic factors on software piracy. In addition, the study demonstrates the possibility of developing FOSS indices for larger scale diagnosis and strategizing.

Free/Open Source Software Development: Recent Research Results and Emerging Opportunities - Walt Scacchi (Proc. European Software Engineering Conference and ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, 2007)

Free/Open Source Software Development: Recent Research Results and Methods - Walt Scacchi (Advances in Computers, 2007)

From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World - Christian Siefkes (2007)
Peer production is a new mode of production that has emerged in the areas of software and content production during the last decades – a mode of production based on sharing and cooperation. We discuss whether and how peer production can be extended into the realm of physical production and whether a society is possible in which peer production is the primary mode of production. We investigate which problems need to be solved for the generalization of peer production and how they can be addressed in the context of individual peer projects as well as society as a whole. Our findings indicate there is no inherent reason for peer production to remain limited to the sphere of information. We analyze how we may expect a society whose economy is based on free cooperation in a multitude of peer projects to work and how such a society compares with societies based on market production or planned production. We show that the differences are striking, and that such a peer economy would grant people an unprecedented amount of control over their own lives, while avoiding the unpleasant effects of other modes of production.

From planning to mature: On the success of open source projects - Stefano Comino; Fabio M. Manenti; Parisi, M. L. (Research Policy, 2007)
Open source is an example of user-centric innovation initiated by an individual or group of users to satisfy their specific needs; the more a software evolves towards a stable release able to address the requirements of its developers, the more successful the project. In this paper we use a large data-set obtained from SourceForge.net to estimate the relationship between a series of different characteristics of OS projects and the probability of evolution of the source code from a preliminary release to a mature version. We show that while projects distributed under highly restrictive licensing terms (GPL) have a significantly smaller probability of reaching a stable release, applications towards sophisticated users have a larger probability of evolving in the development status. Interestingly, we find that the size of the "community of developers" increases the chances of progress but this effect decreases as the community gets larger, a signal of possible coordination problems. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

From the Cathedral to the Bazaar: An Empirical Study of the Lifecycle of Volunteer Community Projects - Capiluppi, Andrea; Martin Michlmayr (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Some free software and open source projects have been extremely successful in the past. The success of a project is often related to the number of developers it can attract: a larger community of developers (the ‘bazaar’) identifies and corrects more software defects and adds more features via a peer-review process. In this paper two free software projects (Wine and Arla) are empirically explored in order to characterize their software lifecycle, development processes and communities. Both the projects show a phase where the number of active developers and the actual work performed on the system is constant, or does not grow: we argued that this phase corresponds to the one termed ‘cathedral’ in the literature. One of the two projects (Wine) shows also a second phase: a sudden growing amount of developers corresponds to a similar growing output produced: we termed this as the ‘bazaar’ phase, and we also argued that this phase was not achieved for the other system. A further analysis revealed that the transition between ‘cathedral’ and ‘bazaar’ was a phase by itself in Wine, achieved by creating a growing amount of new modules, which attracted new developers.

The functioning of a free software community: entanglement of three regulation modes - control, autonomous, and distributed - Didier Demazière; Francois Horn; Marc Zune (Science Studies, 2007)
This paper consider FLOSS communities as ""going concerns"" which necessitate a minimum of order and common, shared, social rules to function. Through an in-depth and diachronic analysis of the Spip project, we present two classical modes of social regulation: a control regulation centred on the product and an autonomous regulation reflecting the differentiated commitments. Our data shows that the meaning, value and legitimacy of contributors' involvements are defined and rated more collectively, through exchanges, judgments, and evaluations. A third regulation mode, called distributed community regulation and aimed at creating and transforming shared rules that produces recognition and stratification, is then presented.

Global and Temporal Analysis of Social Positions at SourceForge. net - Christley, S.; Madey, G. (Third International Conference on Open Source Systems, IFIP WG, 2007)

Guiding the Discovery of Open Source Software Processes with a Reference Model - Chris Jensen; Walt Scacchi (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
This paper describes a reference model for open source software (OSS) processes and its application towards discovering such processes from OSS project artifacts. This reference model is the means to map evidence of an enacted process to a classification of agents, resources, tools, and activities that characterize the process.

How Long Will It Take to Fix This Bug? - Weiss, Cathrin; Premraj, Rahul; Zimmermann, Thomas; Zeller, Andreas (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
Predicting the time and effort for a software problem has long been a difficult task. We present an approach that automatically predicts the fixing effort, i.e., the person-hours spent on fixing an issue. Our technique leverages existing issue tracking systems: given a new issue report, we use the Lucene framework to search for similar, earlier reports and use their average time as a prediction. Our approach thus allows for early effort estimation, helping in assigning issues and scheduling stable releases. We evaluated our approach using effort data from the JBoss project. Given a sufficient number of issues reports, our automatic predictions are close to the actual effort; for issues that are bugs, we are off by only one hour, beating naive predictions by a factor of four.
Keywords: bug fixing; bug reports; effort estimation; jboss; lucene; prediction; time

How to Gather FLOSS Metrics - Conklin, Megan; Gonzalez-Barahona, Jesus; Gregorio Robles (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
In this half-day tutorial, participants will gain hands-on exposure to key technologies for data collection about open source projects.

Identifying Changed Source Code Lines from Version Repositories - Canfora, Gerardo; Cerulo, Luigi; Di Penta, Massimiliano (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
Observing the evolution of software systems at different levels of granularity has been a key issue for a number of studies, aiming at predicting defects or at studying certain phenomena, such as the presence of clones or of crosscutting concerns. Versioning systems such as CVS and SVN, however, only provide information about lines added or deleted by a contributor: any change is shown as a sequence of additions and deletions. This provides an erroneous estimate of the amount of code changed. This paper shows how the evolution of changes at source code line level can be inferred from CVS repositories, by combining information retrieval techniques and the Levenshtein edit distance. The application of the proposed approach to the ArgoUML case study indicates a high precision and recall.
Keywords: argouml; cvs; levenshtein; scm; source code

Identifying Success and Abandonment of Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) Commons: A Preliminary Classification of Sourceforge.net projects - English, R.; Schweik, C. M. (Upgrade: The European Journal for the Informatics Professional, 2007)
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects are a form of commons where individuals work collectively to produce software that is a public, rather than a private, good. The famous phrase “Tragedy of the Commons” describes a situation where a natural resource commons, such as a pasture, or a water supply, gets depleted because of overuse. The tragedy in FLOSS commons is distinctly different: It occurs when collective action ceases before a software product is produced or reaches its full potential. This paper builds on previous work about defining success in FLOSS projects by taking a collective action perspective. We first report the results of interviews with FLOSS developers regarding our ideas about success and failure in FLOSS projects. Building on those interviews and previous work, we then describe our criteria for defining success/tragedy in FLOSS commons. Finally, we discuss the results of a preliminary classification of nearly all projects hosted on Sourceforge.net as of August 2006.
Keywords: flossmole; sourceforge; success

Identifying Success and Tragedy of FLOSS Commons: A Preliminary Classification of Sourceforge. net Projects - English, R.; Schweik, C. M. (Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development, 2007. FLOSS'07. First International Workshop on, 2007)

Impact of the Creation of the Mozilla Foundation in the Activity of Developers - Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona; Gregorio Robles; Herraiz, Israel (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
During 2003, the Mozilla project transitioned from company-promoted (sponsored by AOL) to community-promoted (sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation). What happened to the group of developers during this transition? There was any significant impact on its activity or composition? To answer these questions, we have performed an analysis of the CVS repository of Mozilla, using the CVSAnalY tool, finding little on activity, but dramatic changes in the the composition of the development team.
Keywords: cvs; cvsanaly; developers; mining challenge; mozilla; msr challenge; revision history

Increased security through open source - Hoepman, Jaap-Henk; Jacobs, Bart (Communications of the ACM, 2007)
The last few years have shown a worldwide rise in the attention for, and actual use of, open source software (OSS), most notably of the operating system Linux and various applications running on top of it. Various major companies and governments are adopting OSS. As a result, there are many publications concerning its advantages and disadvantages. The ongoing discussions cover a wide range of topics, such as Windows versus Linux, cost issues, intellectual property rights, development methods, etc. Here we wish to focus on security issues surrounding OSS. It has become a reasonably well-established conviction within the computer security community that publishing designs and protocols contributes to the security of systems built on them. But should one go all the way and publish source code as well? That is the fundamental question that we wish to address in this paper.
Keywords: security

Influence in the Linux Kernel Community - Aaltonen, Timo; Jokinen, Jyke (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Several success stories of open source (OS) products have been seen during last decade. Due to the economical importance of the products, it is important to know who are the ones who have the largest influence to the products. Is there a dominant player in developing communities? In this paper1 the aspect is studied with respect to the Linux Kernel community. We show that the influence is centered to a small number of core people, and corporates have a large impact to the development. Moreover, we enumerate the most influential companies.

Information Policies and Open Source Software in Developing Countries - Gilberto Câmara; Frederico Fonseca (Journal of American Society of Information Science and Technology, 2007)
Many authors propose that open source software (OSS) is a good strategy to bring information and communication technologies to developing countries. Nevertheless, the use of OSS needs to be more than just adopting Linux as the standard for operating systems. Adoption of OSS is not only a choice of software, but also a means of acquiring knowledge. Developing countries have to use OSS as a way to gain knowledge about the technology itself and as a way of creating technology products that fit their specific needs. In this article, the authors introduce a model of OSS based on its essential characteristics to understand how developing countries may use OSS to achieve their development goals. The authors argue that there are two defining properties of any open source software. The first property is the potential for shared conceptualization and the second is the potential for modularity. By assessing how each OSS project satisfies these two conditions, a taxonomy is built for open source projects. This taxonomy will help the development of more sensible policies to promote the use of open source in developing countries.

Information Policies and Open Source Software in Developing Countries - Gilberto Câmara; Frederico Fonseca (2007)
Many authors propose that open source software (OSS) is a good strategy to bring information and communication technologies to developing countries. Nevertheless, the use of OSS needs to be more than just adopting Linux as the standard for operating systems. Adoption of OSS is not only a choice of software, but also a means of acquiring knowledge. Developing countries have to use OSS as a way to gain knowledge about the technology itself and as a way of creating technology products that fit their specific needs. In this article, the authors introduce a model of OSS based on its essential characteristics to understand how developing countries may use OSS to achieve their development goals. The authors argue that there are two defining properties of any open source software. The first property is the potential for shared conceptualization and the second is the potential for modularity. By assessing how each OSS project satisfies these two conditions, a taxonomy is built for open source projects. This taxonomy will help the development of more sensible policies to promote the use of open source in developing countries.

Innovation in Open Source Software Development: A Tale of Two Features - Noll, John (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Open Source Software Development appears to depart radically from conventional notions of software engineering. In particular, requirements for Open Source projects seem to be asserted rather than elicited. This paper examines two features of selected open source products: “tabbed browsing” as realized in the Firefox web browser, and “edge magnetism” found in the Gnome desktop environment’s Metacity window manager. Using archives of mailing lists and issue tracking databases, these features were traced from first mention to release, in attempt to discover the process by which requirements are proposed, adopted, and implemented in their respective Open Source projects. The results confirm the importance of user participation in Open Source projects.
Keywords: email; email archives; features; Firefox; gnome; mailing list; metacity; mozilla

Innovativeness of software solutions: evidence from an alternative methodology. Comparing Free/Open Source and proprietary products - Dario Lorenzi; Cristina Rossi (2007)
The issue of innovation processes taking place in the software sector is currently widely debated. Challenging questions arise about what products/services have to be considered innovative, and whether a specific artefact is innovative or not. In this framework, the widespread success of the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) put forward new research issues, dealing with whether and how programs developed according to the new production paradigm turn out to be more innovative than traditional ones. In this framework, this paper aims at contributing to the literature by addressing three main research questions: (i) are software solutions produced by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) innovative? (ii) What kinds of innovations are implemented? And, finally, (iii) are programs based on FOSS more innovative than proprietary ones?Basing on a sample of 134 software solutions produced by Italian SMEs and using an original methodology to asses the problem of evaluating innovation in the software field, we provides some first insights of what emerges if we set aside the traditional innovation indicators and endower to build alternative metrics, specifically developed to target the complexity of the innovation processes in the software markets.

Introducing Usability Practices to OSS: The Insiders’ Experience - Osiński, Stanisław; Weiss, Dawid (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
This paper presents a case study of introducing usability practices to a small open source project called Carrot2. We describe our experiences from a point of view of an active Carrot2 developer, who is at the same time a usability enthusiast and practitioner. We perform a critical analysis of the system’s original user interface and describe the steps we took to improve it. We also analyse the success factors and the impact of the whole redesign process.

Introduction to OSS 2007 Tutorial Program - Damiani, Ernesto (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Today, most software researchers and professionals consider Open Source as a greatly successful paradigm for large-scale production of high-quality software systems. However, most of them would probably agree that successfully applying this paradigm requires dealing with a number of important issues. One of the best reasons to attend OSS conference series is being able to discuss these issues in an unprecedented gathering of top-notch researchers, developers, and leaders from all avenues of the open source movement. Attending good tutorials, in particular, is a great opportunity for getting in touch with new ideas and discussing them in depth with real experts.

Introduction to Panel Discussions at the Third International Conference on Open Source Systems — OSS 2007 - Sandra Slaughter (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Two diverse, stimulating and important panel discussions are included in this year’s programme on open source systems. The first panel explores the diverse set of legal issues and risks that arise as governments increasingly adopt open source systems. Governments are attracted to open source software systems by the potential cost savings, open standards and protocols, and the flexibility, adaptability and reliability of the systems. However, there are serious legal issues and liabilities that can arise when governments adopt open source systems. This panel identifies and examines potential legal risks and liabilities from open source systems adoption in the government context. Some of the important legal concerns discussed by this panel include intellectual property rights, licensing, and protection of sensitive or confidential information. The second panel is organized as a debate in which the panelists will consider the advantages and disadvantages of the sharing of research data and analyses by open source systems researchers. The area of open source systems has attracted numerous researchers from many different disciplines. In part, the attraction of research on open source systems is due to the public information available about open source communities. Using this information, researchers have been uncovering fascinating insights about how open source systems are developed and used and how open source communities function. Unfortunately, as noted by this panel, the work products of this research are not readily available to the public. This prevents new researchers from validating, building upon and extending the research already conducted by others. However, making research work products available to the others, while potentially valuable, has associated disadvantages. For example, certain kinds of data collected by a researcher (such as surveys or other confidential information) may not be released to the public, given human subjects concerns. In addition, it can require substantial cost and effort on the part of the researcher to make research work products understandable and usable by others. This panel debates the issues surrounding the pros and cons of making open source systems research work products available to researchers.

Introduction to Workshops at the Third International Conference on Open Source Systems — OSS 2007 - Hissam, Scott (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
The International Conference on Open Source Systems owes its success to the increasing desire of researchers and academicians to engage in open conversation and sharing with the open source community regarding its’motivations, products, processes and data. This diverse representation of the growing practical and academic interest in Open Source Systems and its impact on the software engineering community is represented in the five workshops that accompany this year’s conference. OSS 2007 welcomes these workshops as participants engage, in an informal setting, driven by fundamental academic interests, or by more applied industrial or commercial interests to discuss technical issues, exchange research ideas, and to develop a community in the field of Open Source Software and/or Systems.

Investigating recognition-based performance in an open content community: A social capital perspective - Okoli, C.; Oh, Wonseok (Information & Management, 2007)
As the open source movement grows, it becomes important to understand the dynamics that affect the motivation of participants who contribute their time freely to such projects. One important motivation that has been identified is the desire for formal recognition in the open source community. We investigated the impact of social capital in participants' social networks on their recognition-based performance; i.e., the formal status they are accorded in the community. We used a sample of 465 active participants in the Wikipedia open content encyclopedia community to investigate the effects of two types of social capital and found that network closure, measured by direct and indirect ties, had a significant positive effect on increasing participants' recognition-based performance. Structural holes had mixed effects on participants' status, but were generally a source of social capital. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: open content; recognition-based performance; social capital; social networks; social status; virtual communities

Investigating success of open source software projects: A social network perspective - Jing Wu; Khim-Yong Goh; Qian Tang (International Conference on Information Systems, 2007)
Keywords: CollectedOwnData NoShare

Knowledge Work Artifacts: Kernel Cousins for Free/Open Source Software Development - Elliott, M.; Ackerman, Mark S.; Walt Scacchi (ACM Conference on Support of Group Work (GROUP07), 2007)

Learning and the imperative of production in Free/Open Source development - Evangelia Berdou (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
This paper examines the role of learning in structuring access and participation in F/OS communities. In particular it highlights the challenges and barriers to access faced by new developers and the expectations of senior developers regarding the mindsets and capabilities of new contributors. It is argued that learning in F/OS is inextricably connected with the demand for continuous production. The evidence presented is drawn from interviews conducted with inexperienced and experienced contributors from the GNOME and KDE projects. The author challenges the view of learning as an enculturation process and the paper contributes to the understanding of power relations among established and peripheral members in communities of practice.

Learning Through Practical Involvement in the OSS Ecosystem: Experiences from a Masters Assignment - Lundell, Björn; Persson, Anna; Lings, Brian (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Increased awareness of and interest in Open Source has led to a number of university teaching initiatives, at both national and European level. In this paper we present experiences from a practical assignment designed to give students on an Open Source Masters course an insight into real involvement in Open Source projects. It discusses the motivations for the assignment, and how it was set up and executed. It reports on post facto student feedback, and reflects on a parallel, reduced exercise offered at undergraduate level. We find that the learning experience was both positive and valuable in that it gave real insight into Open Source participation, and also encouraged further participation in Open Source projects by students after the course had completed.

Legal issues for free and open source software in government - Nic Suzor; Fitzgerald, Brian; Perry, Mark (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
As more governments begin to adopt and release free and open source software, it is important to be able to readily recognise and identify the associated legal risks and potential liabilities. This panel will examine and discuss the most common of these associated risks and liabilities. These issues include, but are not limited to: indemnities against claims of intellectual property infringement from third parties requirements of consumer protection and antitrust legislation obligations to redistribute source, and when they arise enforceability of free software licences layering and combining of licences dual-licensing licence incompatibility software patent liability contemporary developments in software licensing

Levels of Formality in FOSS Communities - Schofield, Andrew; Cooper, Grahame (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
One of the aspects of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) which may act as a significant deterrent to its adoption, is the method used to collaboratively develop the software and provide support through the use of communities. It is not until this method is examined more closely that its many advantages can be realised. The method can, however, seem very disorganised especially when compared with traditional proprietary development styles. A key difference between these two development approaches lies in the management of projects, and perhaps as a consequence, in the level of formality in the community environment. This paper presents the results of empirical survey research investigating FOSS community participants’ views on the level of formality in FOSS, and the way in which this affects both development and support provision activities. The paper then concludes by analysing what can be learnt from the participant’s views.

Local and Global Recency Weighting Approach to Bug Prediction - Joshi, Hemant; Zhang, Chuanlei; Ramaswamy, S.; Bayrak, Coskun (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
Finding and fixing software bugs is a challenging maintenance task, and a significant amount of effort is invested by software development companies on this issue. In this paper, we use the Eclipse project's recorded software bug history to predict occurrence of future bugs. The history contains information on when bugs have been reported and subsequently fixed.
Keywords: bug fixing; bug reports; eclipse; maintenance; prediction

Love and other demons: game theory in enterpreneurial and love relationships - Guillermo Flores; Alejandro Mendighetti; Jorge Sánchez (2007)
The article studies the risk aversion and information assymetry differences in two fields of relationships: between partners and in a loving couple.

Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects - Evangelia Berdou (2007)
The thesis investigates two fundamental dynamics of participation and collaboration in mature, community-led Free/Open Source (F/OS) software projects - commercialization and peripheral participation. The two primary case studies of the research are the GNOME and KDE communities.The thesis contributes insights into how the gift economy is embedded in the exchange economy and the role of peripheral contributors. The analysis indicates that community-integrated paid developers have a key role in project development, maintaining the infrastructure aspects of the code base. The analysis suggests that programming and non-programming contributors are distinct in their make-up, priorities and rhythms of participation, and that learning plays an important role in controlling access. The results show that volunteers are important drivers of peripheral activities, such as translation and documentation. The term "autonomous peripherality"" is used to capture the unique characteristics of these activities. These findings support the argument that centrality and peripherality are associated with the division of labour, which, in turn, is associated with employment relations and frameworks of institutional support. The thesis shows how the tensions produced by commercialization and peripheral participation are interwoven with values of meritocracy, ritual and strategic enactment of the idea of community as well as with tools and techniques developed to address the emergence of a set of problems specific to management and governance. These are characterized as "technologies of communities."

Measuring the evolution of open source software systems with their communities - Yi Wang; Defeng Guo; Shi, Huihui (SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes, 2007)
Open Source Software (OSS) has become the subject of much commercial and academic interest in last few years. As traditional software, OSS also evolves to fulfill the need of stakeholders. Therefore, providing quantitative metrics for OSS evolution has also become an urgent issue. However, most existing studies of software evolution have been performed on systems developed within a single company using traditional management techniques. These metrics models are inadequate to measure OSS evolution. In this paper, we describe a preliminary evolution metrics set for evaluating OSS. The most significant novelty of this model is that it takes specific properties of Open Source Community (OSC) into consideration. In another word, we measure the evolution of OSS and OSC together. We also provide a lightweight case study on Ubuntu project using this metrics set. We find out that the Open Source Community and its members also play essential role in OSS evolution. We expect this metrics model can bring better understandings and explanations of phenomena in open source development and evolution.
Keywords: evolution; launchpad; metrics; open source community; open source software; Ubuntu

Membership herding and network stability in the open source community: The Ising perspective - Oh, Wonseok; Jeon, Sangyong (Management Science, 2007)
The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to conceptually understand membership dynamics in the open source software (OSS) community, and (2) to explore how different network characteristics (i.e., network size and connectivity) influence the stability of an OSS network. Through the lens of Ising theory, which is widely accepted in physics, we investigate basic patterns of interaction and present fresh conceptual insight into dynamic and reciprocal relations among OSS community members. We also perform computer simulations based on empirical data collected from two actual OSS communities. Key findings include: (1) membership herding is highly present when external influences (e.g., the availability of other OSS projects) are weak, but decreases significantly when external influences increase, (2) propensity for membership herding is most likely to be seen in a large network with random connectivity, and (3) for large networks, when external influences are weak, random connectivity will result in higher network strength than scale-free connectivity (as external influences increase, however, the reverse phenomenon is observed). In addition, scale-free connectivity appears to be less volatile than random connectivity in response to an increase in the strength of external influences. We conclude with several implications that may be of significance to OSS stakeholders in particular, and to a broader range of online communities in general.
Keywords: BEHAVIOR; DYNAMICS; ECONOMICS; INNOVATION; INVESTMENT; Ising theory; membership herding; MODEL; MOTIVATION; network connectivity; network stability; open source; PHASE-TRANSITION; UNCERTAINTY

Micro-dynamics of Free and Open Source Software Development. Lurking, laboring and launching new projects on SourceForge - Paul A. David; Francesco Rullani (2007)
Quantitative methods are employed to describe two fundamental processes in the creation of free (libre) and open source software (FLOSS) that are at work in the collaborative development environment of the SourceForge.Net platform: resource mobilization and "entrepreneurial initiatives" which generate new development projects. The micro dynamics of the individuals' involvements in these processes are analysed by defining "activity states" that correspond to "lurking" (not contributing or contributing to projects without become a member), "laboring" (joining one or more projects as members), and "launching" (founding one or more projects). The transition probability matrices constructed from observations on the activities of 222,835 individuals who registered on SF.net (during a 14-month period, mainly in 2001) characterize first-order Markov chains describing processes that are ergodic. The computation of the limiting "equilibrium" distribution of individual joining and launching activities is not used here to produce long-run predictions, because the time window of the available data is too short. Instead, it is conceived as an instrument to isolate the main forces acting in the underlying entrepreneurial and recruitment dynamics at work on the platform "shaking off" the weaker tendencies. It is shown that, although only a small proportion of the considered cohorts of SF.net registrants become even minimally active, the active "core" of project members and project founders is able to attract an increasing number of developers. SourceForge is seen to be more than an attractor of projects that are being "born again" under open source licenses: this virtual collaborative development environment shares the regenerative properties of tangible "industrial districts" that give rise to new, innovative enterprises. Implications for the exploitation and exploitation processes at work in the FLOSS model and about its sustainability are also derived.

Mining CVS Repositories to Understand Open-Source Project Developer Roles - Yu, Liguo; Ramaswamy, Srini (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
This paper presents a model to represent the interactions of distributed open-source software developers and utilizes data mining techniques to derive developer roles. The model is then applied on case studies of two open-source projects, ORAC-DR and Mediawiki with encouraging results.
Keywords: cvs; developer interaction; developers; mediawiki; orac-dr; roles; scm; source code

Mining Eclipse Developer Contributions via Author-Topic Models - Linstead, Erik; Rigor, Paul; Bajracharya, Sushil; Lopes, Cristina; Baldi, Pierre (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
We present the results of applying statistical author-topic models to a subset of the Eclipse 3.0 source code consisting of 2,119 source files and 700,000 lines of code from 59 developers. This technique provides an intuitive and automated framework with which to mine developer contributions and competencies from a given code base while simultaneously extracting software function in the form of topics. In addition to serving as a convenient summary for program function and developer activities, our study shows that topic models provide a meaningful, effective, and statistical basis for developer similarity analysis.
Keywords: contributions; developers; eclipse; expertise; mining challenge; msr challenge; source code; topics

Mining Software Repositories with iSPAROL and a Software Evolution Ontology - Kiefer, Christoph; Bernstein, Abraham; Tappolet, Jonas (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software RepositoriesFourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
One of the most important decisions researchers face when analyzing the evolution of software systems is the choice of a proper data analysis/exchange format. Most existing formats have to be processed with special programs written specifically for that purpose and are not easily extendible. Most scientists, therefore, use their own database(s) requiring each of them to repeat the work of writing the import/export programs to their format. We present EvoOnt, a software repository data exchange format based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL). EvoOnt includes software, release, and bug-related information. Since OWL describes the semantics of the data, EvoOnt is (1) easily extendible, (2) comes with many existing tools, and (3) allows to derive assertions through its inherent Description Logic reasoning capabilities. The paper also shows iSPARQL -- our SPARQL-based Semantic Web query engine containing similarity joins. Together with EvoOnt, iSPARQL can accomplish a sizable number of tasks sought in software repository mining projects, such as an assessment of the amount of change between versions or the detection of bad code smells. To illustrate the usefulness of EvoOnt (and iSPARQL), we perform a series of experiments with a real-world Java project. These show that a number of software analyses can be reduced to simple iSPARQL queries on an EvoOnt dataset.
Keywords: database; eclipse; evoont; java; owl; semantic; sparql

Mining Workspace Updates in CVS - Zimmermann, Thomas (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
The version control archive CVS records not only all changes in a project but also activity data such as when developers create or update their workspaces. Furthermore, CVS records when it has to integrate changes because of parallel development. In this paper, we analyze the CVS activity data of four large open-source projects GCC, JBOSS, JEDIT, and PYTHON to investigate parallel development: What is the degree of parallel development? How frequently do conflicts occur during updates and how are they resolved? How do we identify changes that contain integrations?
Keywords: change management; cvs; developers; gcc; jboss; jedit; python; workspaces

Motivating job design as a factor in open source governance - Guido Hertel (J Manage Governance, 2007)
Successful open source software (OSS) projects can be considered as examples of how ambitious work results can be achieved in web-based collaboration even when monetary incentives are low or absent. While former explorations of motivational processes in OSS projects primarily focused on person-oriented aspects such as motives, interests, and expected benefits of contributors, job-related factors have been largely neglected. After discussing the limitations of a personoriented focus, a research perspective is suggested that concentrates on job design and work context in OSS based on frameworks from work psychology. A theoretical analysis is presented discussing job characteristics of successful OSS projects as potential explanations of the high motivation of OSS contributors. Compared to a person-oriented perspective, the results of a job-oriented approach might be better transferable to other projects (both OSS and ??closed source?? software development) and provide guidelines for the governance of successful web-based collaboration.

Network Analysis of the SourceForge.net Community - Gao, Yongqin; Madey, Greg (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Software is central to the functioning of modern computer-based society. The OSS (Open Source Software) phenomenon is a novel, widely growing approach to develop both applications and infrastructure software. In this research, we studied the community network of the SourceForge.net, especially the structure and evolution of the community network, to understand the Open Source Software movement. We applied three different analyses on the network, including structure analysis, centrality analysis and path analysis. By applying these analyses, we are able to gain insights of the network development and its influence to individual developments.

Norms, Rewards, and their Effect on the Motivation of Open Source Software Developers - Oliver Alexy; Martin Leitner (working paper, 2007)
In this study, we conduct a scenario experiment testing the effect of monetary rewards on intrinsic motivation of open source software (OSS) developers. While we observe no difference in intrinsic motivation between the payment and no payment scenario, total motivation increases when a monetary reward is offered. We find that self-reported interest increases in the payment scenario when there is a norm for payment, whereas it decreases when there is a norm for no payment. We conclude that, under certain preconditions, monetary rewards may well be used in OSS development.

Noticing Notice: A large-scale experiment on the timing of software license agreements. - N. Good; J. Grossklags; D. Mulligan; Konstan, J.A. (ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2007)

Open Borders? Immigration in Open Source Projects - Christian Bird; Gourley, Alex; Devanbu, Prem; Swaminathan, Anand; Hsu, Greta (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software RepositoriesFourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
Open source software is built by teams of volunteers. Each project has a core team of developers, who have the authority to commit changes to the repository; this team is the elite, committed foundation of the project, selected through a meritocratic process from a larger number of people who participate on the mailing list. Most projects carefully regulate admission of outsiders to full developer privileges; some projects even have formal descriptions of this process. Understanding the factors that influence the "who, how and when" of this process is critical, both for the sustainability of FLOSS projects, and for outside stakeholders who want to gain entry and succeed. In this paper we mount a quantitative case study of the process by which people join FLOSS projects, using data mined from the Apache web server, Postgres, and Python. We develop a theory of open source project joining, and evaluate this theory based on our data.
Keywords: apache; core; joining; postgresql; python; team

Open Source and the software industry. How firms do business out of an open innovation paradigm - Andrea Bonaccorsi; Monica Merito; Rossi Cristina; Lucia Piscitello (2007)
Open Source Software (OSS) represents an ???open innovation??? paradigm based on knowledge produced and shared by developers and users. The paper inquires how OSS challenges the three Teece???s building blocks. New findings from a large survey of European software companies, show that within the OSS paradigm: (i) OSS can be a sustainable business model even in the absence of any appropriability; (ii) complementary assets are distributed collectively and made widely available without the need for dedicated contractual arrangements; (iii) a de facto dominant design may stem from a community of users/producers even independently of the presence of powerful large companies.

An Open Source Approach to Developing Software in a Small Organization - Martin, Ken; Hoffman, Bill (IEEE Software, 2007)
This article is part of a special issue on Software Engineering Challenges in Small Software Organizations. The software development approach that developers at Kitware use borrows techniques from agile development and Extreme Programming and emphasizes long-term, ongoing projects. The company has used this approach on open source and closed-source projects in a wide range of sizes
Keywords: Cross-platform; Small-business; software engineering; Software testing

Open Source Collaboration for Fostering Off-The-Shelf Components Selection - Ayala, Claudia; Søensen, Carl-Fredrik; Conradi, Reidar; Franch, Xavier; Li, Jingyue (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
The use of Off-The-Shelf software components in Component- Based Development implies many challenges. One of them is the lack of available and well-suited data to support selection of suitable OTS components. This paper proposes a feasible and incremental way to federate and reuse the different efforts for finding, selecting, and maintaining OTS components in a structured way. This is done not only for supporting OTS components selection, but also to overcome reported problems with the integration and maintenance of component repositories. It is based on the “open source collaboration” idea to incrementally build an OTS components reuse infrastructure, enabling automatic support for OTS selection processes.

Open Source Licensing & Scattering Opportunism in Software Standards - Greg R Vetter (2007)
Despite their beneficial influence on interoperability and markets, problems of detrimental opportunism occur with technology standards, including standards implemented in software, which this Article calls "Software Standards." Inspired by new perspectives on the study of semicommons in the history of real property, this Article contemplates the substitutability of free and open source software ("FOSS") for traditional standard-setting approaches. Standards are analogous to semicommons, where public and private use interact, raising the possibility of opportunistic influence on the Software Standard to increase private gain at the expense of the public benefit in a more uniform standard. With its source code disclosure requirement, FOSS shifts and dampens this opportunism, although various limits influence the reach of its effect. The political economy around a standard will express itself differently under a FOSS implementation, and clearing intellectual property rights in the standard is no more certain than under the traditional standard-setting approach.

Open Source Software and Economic Growth: A Classical Division of Labor Perspective - Giampaolo Garzarelli; Yasmina Reem Limam; Bjørn Thomassen (2007)
The article turns to classical economic insights on the division of labor and to institutional reasoning to identify some costs and benefits of Open Source Software (OSS) and proprietary software production. It suggests that, thanks to its licenses, OSS favors market expansion more than proprietary software does by tapping into spontaneous work input. The spontaneous tapping leads to a division of labor that exhibits what the article calls redundant economies. By generating a circle of knowledge growth, reuse, and sharing, redundant economies lead to increasing returns, which are crucial for economic growth.

Open Source Software and Open Data Standards as a form of Technology Adoption: a Case Study - Rossi, Bruno; Russo, Barbara; Succi, Giancarlo (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
The process of technology adoption has been studied for long time to give instruments to evaluate the best strategies to ease the introduction of technology. While the main research on Open Source Software focuses mainly on the development process, team collaboration and programmers’ motivations, very few studies consider Open Source Software in this context. In this paper, we provide an overview of literature on technology adoption that can be useful to relate the concepts. We then provide a case study with historical data about file generation and usage across time to evaluate the adoption of Open Source Software and Open Data Standards in the specific case provided.

Open Source Software and Product Lines 2007 - van der Linden, Frank; Lundell, Björn (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
Embedded industries have invested a lot in the introduction of software product lines in their software development. In addition, using open source software appears to be a profitable way to obtain good software. This is also applicable for organizations doing product line engineering. On the other hand, because of the diverse use of open source software, product line development is an attractive way of working in open source communities. In fact, the configuration mechanisms used in open source communities may be applicable within software product lines as well. In addition, product line organisations are usually involved in distributed development, which works very efficiently within open source communities. However, at present, there is limited interaction between the open source and product line development communities. The aim for the workshop is to explore what the two communities can learn from each other and to develop a better understanding of how the two communities can benefit from each other. The workshop deals with the following issues: –Community: Ownership, control and management of product line assets in an open source community –Visibility of the code: when it is valuable to share proprietary code and how to take the right decision. –Architecture Views: Creation of different levels of architecture visibility: proprietary, among closed consortium, public. –Is this possible? –Product line requirements roadmaps and planning in open source development –Variability management: Using the open source community to evolve components and being explicit about variability –Variability representation: in an open source community –Deployment: Open source for the platform and in applications –Heterogeneous processes: Cohabitation of product line management and agile processes –Tools: Open source asset management tools in product line development –Domain and application engineering and their meaning in an open source context –Recovery and recognition of a product line in an open source asset base –Legal: Aspects dealing with evolutionary, variability or distribution of development relating to legal risks involving: liability, warranties, patent infringements etc.

Open source software development and the small world phenomenon: an empirical investigations of macro level colaboration network properties on project success - Param Vir Singh (International Conference on Information Systems, 2007)
Keywords: NotreDameArchive

Open Source Software Development as a Model for Internet Governance - Jeremy Malcolm (2007)
Internet governance and open source software development alike are most effectively achieved through a balance of decentralisation and control. For Internet governance, this is found in governance by network, in which governmental and private stakeholders, and the hierarchical and decentralised mechanisms of governance they respectively favour, are brought together. However if the stakeholders' power is unequal, so will be the balance of the network. The case of open source software development provides the key to ensuring that stakeholders are not oppressed in a network unbalanced by hierarchical power. This relies on the phenomenon of exit-based empowerment that flows from the open source software licence. However, it can be extended to the design of governance networks given certain idealising assumptions, and even when these do not hold, useful lessons for the future reform of Internet governance arrangements remain.

Open source software: Motivation and restrictive licensing - Fershtman, Chaim; Gandal, Neil (International Economics and Economic Policy, 2007)
Open source software (OSS) is an economic paradox. Development of open source software is often done by unpaid volunteers and the source code is typically freely available. Surveys suggest that status, signaling, and intrinsic motivations play an important role in inducing developers to invest effort. Contribution to an OSS project is rewarded by adding one’s name to the list of contributors which is publicly observable. Such incentives imply that programmers may have little incentive to contribute beyond the threshold level required for being listed as a contributor. Using a unique data set we empirically examine this hypothesis. We find that the output per contributor in open source projects is much higher when licenses are less restrictive and more commercially oriented. These results indeed suggest a status, signaling, or intrinsic motivation for participation in OSS projects with restrictive licenses.
Keywords: contributions; contributors; developers; incentives; license analysis; licenses; lines of code; loc; MOTIVATION; restrictive; scm; size; status; version history

Open Source Software: The use of open source - Mahmoud Refaat Nasr (2007)
This thesis explores the reasons behind the poor level of adoption of open source web GIS software, and whether it is due to poor awareness about open source concepts or due to technical deficiencies in the open source tools. The research was done in 2 major phases; the first phase involved conducting surveys to measure the awareness and attitudes towards open source. The surveys examined three categories of people involved in the IT industry, namely: decision makers, software developers, and end users. The measurement of awareness was done by developing an Awareness Indicator and a Sentiment Indicator for each category. These indicators were developed by the author during the course of the study in order to provide a measurable and descriptive indication of the results. The second phase involved performing a comparative analysis between MapServer a leading open source web GIS tool, and three of the leading proprietary web GIS software, namely: ESRI's ArcIMS, Intergraph's GeoMedia WebMap, and MapInfo's MapXtreme. The results of the research provide an insight on how different categories of people view open source, and demonstrate that lack of awareness about open source concepts and its competencies may be a major reason behind the poor adoption of open source solutions. The results of the comparative analysis also demonstrate that MapServer is technically equivalent to its commercial counter parts.

Open source technologies for visually impaired people - Boccacci, Patrizia; Carrega, Veronica; Dodero, Gabriella (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
We describe two open source applications which we have experienced as very useful aids for the integration of people suffering from visual impairments, from hypovision to actual blindness. The first application is based on speech synthesis and has been experienced by disabled university students. The second experience is oriented to schoolchildren with low residual vision, and it provides their educators and parents with easy to use tools for image manipulation, especially designed for exploiting residual visual abilities.

Open vs. closed: which source is more secure? - Ford, Richard (Queue, 2007)
There is no better way to start an argument among a group of developers than proclaiming Operating System A to be “more secure” than Operating System B. I know this from first-hand experience, as previous papers I have published on this topic have led to reams of heated e-mails directed at me—including some that were, quite literally, physically threatening. Despite the heat (not light!) generated from attempting to investigate the relative security of different software projects, investigate we must. Understanding why products are (and are not) secure is a critical stepping stone toward building better software. Before wading into these dangerous waters, we should clarify the question. All too often when comparing open and closed source approaches, the question is unconsciously interpreted as Windows versus Linux. While that’s a fantastic question to knock around, doing so is a very narrow way of looking at the world, as it ignores many other projects in both the open and closed source worlds. Although it’s foolish to ignore the data points the Windows/Linux world provides, they are simply examples of the process. So, let us first strip away the misconception that the question is about these particular platforms and recognize its real breadth. With this in mind, our answer requires three crucial definitions in order to have meaning: “What is open source?”; “What is closed source?”; and, surprisingly, “What is security?” The first two we can deal with quickly; the third is a lot subtler, however, so we shall tackle it first.

OpenBQR: a framework for the assessment of OSS - Taibi, Davide; Lavazza, Luigi; Morasca, Sandro (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
People and organizations that are considering the adoption of OSS, or that need to choose among different OS products face the problem of evaluating OSS in a systematic, sound and complete way. While several proposals concerning the evaluation of costs and benefits exist, little attention has been given to the evaluation of technical qualities and, in general, to the “usage-oriented” issues. In this paper the existing proposals are examined, the different types of qualities and issues that are relevant to potential users are described, and a coherent and innovative method for the evaluation of OSS is proposed. The proposed method is expected to support the potential user in the evaluation and choice of OSS in a flexible way, taking into account all the aspects that are relevant to the user.

Out of Box Experience Issues of Free and Open Source Software - Göktürk Mehmet; Görkem Çetin (2007)
Abstract. This study addresses the Out-Of-Box Experience (OOBE) usability issues of Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) considering outcomes of distributed development process and high number of available product choices. A methodology is presented, usability experiments are conducted and results are discussed. The objective was to determine key factors that affect usability of F/OSS during OOBE and first hours of use. We concluded that OOBE of F/OSS was significant in software usability perception and possible adoption. User experience, visible structure, consistency and functionality of the interface had significant impact on OOBE and first hours of use. Neither online support, nor product box appearance appeared as important.

Patchworks of Open-Source Software: High-Fidelity Low-cost Prototypes. - Jones, M.C.; Floyd, I.R.; Twidale, M.B (The Handbook of Research on Open Source Software., 2007)

Penguin in a new suit: A tale of how de novo entrants emerged to harness free and open source communities - Linus Dahlander (2007)
A growing body of literature has explored the motivations for individuals to take part in free and open source software (FOSS), yet how firms participate is largely an unattended research area. Building on information from an extensive dataset of secondary sources and 30 in-depth interviews, I show that de novo entrants have emerged in conjunction with a changing institutional infrastructure and a more pragmatic attitude toward firms that focus on technological benefits rather than ideology. To understand how these firms try to harness the work of these communities, I use the empirical data to derive a 2*2 matrix of different approaches. The X axis reflects whether or not the firms initiated a new community or relied on communities founded by peers, whereas the Y axis represents the degree of participation of the firm in the community. This taxonomy illustrates how de novo entrant are initiating new forms of communities or joining communities established by peers. This suggests that while many of the central pillars of FOSS remains, de novo entrants have emerged to find new ways of making business resulting in various implications for firm strategies and knowledge disclosure. PLEASE EMAIL IF YOU LIKE A COPY OF THE PAPER!

Perceptions on F/OSS Adoption - Ozel, Bulent; Jovanovic, Uros; Oba, Beyza; van Leeuwen, Manon (OSS2007: Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation (IFIP 2.13), 2007)
This paper aims to reveal results of a survey run by the tOSSad1 project. The majority of survey variables devised to capture perception of public administrators around Europe regarding the importance they attach to the factors such as F/OSS product quality, availability of support, expertise and documentation, TCO, vendor lock-in, political influence, administrative attitudes, productivity, and training costs, all of which intermingle with financial, technical, legal, and personal issues. The analysis consist of depiction of respondents’ administration profile in terms of their F/OSS usage and adoption, descriptive summary and analyses of factors mentioned above, and statistical inferential analyses of survey items. Some valid statistical tests are conducted to understand, to discuss and to see the extend and significance of any F/OSS adoption generalizations for Europe based on the findings of this particular survey.

Predicting Defects and Changes with Import Relations - Schroter, Adrian (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
Lowering the number of defects and estimating the development time of a software project are two important goals of software engineering. To predict the number of defects and changes we train models with import relations. This enables us to decrease the number of defects by more efficient testing and to assess the effort needed in respect to the number of changes.
Keywords: defects; eclipse; effort estimation; mining challenge; msr challenge; prediction

Predicting Eclipse Bug Lifetimes - Panjer, Lucas D. (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software RepositoriesFourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
In non-trivial software development projects planning and allocation of resources is an important and difficult task. Estimation of work time to fix a bug is commonly used to support this process. This research explores the viability of using data mining tools to predict the time to fix a bug given only the basic information known at the beginning of a bug's lifetime. To address this question, a historical portion of the Eclipse Bugzilla database is used for modeling and predicting bug lifetimes. A bug history transformation process is described and several data mining models are built and tested. Interesting behaviours derived from the models are documented. The models can correctly predict up to 34.9% of the bugs into a discretized log scaled lifetime class.
Keywords: bug fixing; bugzilla; classification; eclipse; effort estimation; mining challenge; msr challenge; prediction; weka

A Preliminary Analysis of Publicly Available FLOSS Measurements: Towards Discovering Maintainability Trends - Samoladas, Ioannis; Bibi, Stamatia; Ioannis Stamelos; Sowe, Sulayman K.; Deligiannis, Ignatios (2nd Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2007), 2007)
The spread of free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) and the openness of its development model oﬀer researchers a valuable source of information regarding software data. The creation of large portals, which host a vast amount of FLOSS projects make it easy to create large datasets with valuable information regarding the FLOSS development process. In addition initiatives such as FLOSSMole provide researchers with a single point and continuing access to those data. Up to now the majority of datasets from FLOSSMole oﬀered data regarding the development process and not the code itself. From February 2007 FLOSSMole oﬀers data donated by SourceKibitzer, which contain source code metrics for FLOSS projects written in Java. In this paper we provide a premilinary analysis on those data using machine learning techniques, such as classiﬁcation rules and decision trees. Using the ﬁrst available data from February 2007, we tried to build rules that can be used in order to estimate the future values of metrics oﬀered for March. Here we present some preliminary results that are encouraging and deserve to be further analyzed in future releases of SourceKibitzer datasets.
Keywords: decision tree; flossmole; java; machine learning; metrics; sourcekibitzer

Prioritizing Warning Categories by Analyzing Software History - Kim, Sunghun; Ernst, Michael D. (Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007)
Automatic bug finding tools tend to have high false positive rates: most warnings do not indicate real bugs. Usually bug finding tools prioritize each warning category. For example, the priority of "overflow" is 1 and the priority of "jumbled incremental" is 3, but the tools' prioritization is not very effective. In this paper, we prioritize warning categories by analyzing the software change history. The underlying intuition is that if warnings from a category are resolved quickly by developers, the warnings in the category are important. Experiments with three bug finding tools (FindBugs, JLint, and PMD) and two open source projects (Columba and jEdit) indicate that different warning categories have very different lifetimes. Based on that observation, we propose a preliminary algorithm for warning category prioritizing.
Keywords: bug fixing; change history; columba; findbugs; jedit; jlint; kenyon; pmd; warning

Productivity effects of information diffusion in email networks - Sinan Aral; Erik Brynjolfsson; Marshall Van Alstyne (Twenty Eighth International Conference on Information Systems, 2007)

Programming Language Trends in Open Source Development: An Evaluation Using Data from All Production Phase SourceForge Projects - Delorey, Daniel P.; Knutson, Charles D.; Giraud-Carrier, C. (2nd Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2007), 2007)
In this work, we analyze data collected from the CVS repos- itories of 9,997 Open Source projects hosted on SourceForge in an effort to understand trends in programming language usage in the Open Source community between 2000 and 2005. The trends we consider include: 1) the relative popularity of the ten most popular programming languages over time, 2) the use of multiple programming languages by individual programmers and by individual projects, and 3) the programming languages most often used in combination.
Keywords: cvs; cvs2mysql; programming languages; sfra; sourceforge; srda