Four Interesting Ways in Which History Can Teach Us About Software - Michael Godfrey; Xinyi Dong; Cory Kapser; Lijie Zou (Proceedings of the 2004 international workshop on Mining software repositories - MSR '04, 2004)
In this position paper, we outline four kinds of studies that we have undertaken in trying to understand various aspects of a software system’s evolutionary history. In each instance, the studies have involved detailed examination of real software systems based on “facts” extracted from various kinds of source artifact repositories, as well as the development of accompanying tools to aid in the extraction, abstraction, and comprehension processes. We briefly discuss the goals, results, and methodology of each approach.
Keywords: ant; apache; change analysis; clone; clone detection; cvs; evolution; gcc; growth; kepler; linux; midworld; mycore; postgresql; source code; version control

Free and open source development practices in the game community - Walt Scacchi (Software, IEEE, 2004)
Findings from empirical studies of free and open source software systems in different communities show that some common processes and practices exist across the board. The studies focused on software development practices, social processes, technical system configurations, organizational contexts, and interrelationships that give rise to free and open source systems, These distinct communities, and the computer game community in particular, provide examples of common practices.

Free & Open Source Software Creation and ‘the Economy of Regard’ - Jean-Michel Dalle; Paul A. David; Rishab Ayer Ghosh; Frank A. Wolak (Third EPIP Workshop, 2004)
Keywords: linux; linux kernel; scm; source code

Free Software Development: Cooperation and Conflict in a Virtual Organizational Culture - Margret Elliott; Walt Scacchi (Free/Open Source Software Development, 2004)

Free/Open Source Software Development Practices in the Computer Game Community - Walt Scacchi (IEEE Software, 2004)

From Bazaar to Kibbutz: How Freedom Deals with Coherence in the Debian Project - Monga, M. (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
The goal of obtaining a coherent distribution of software packages where all programs interact smoothly increases its complexity with the number of applications, the number of architectures involved, and the number of system configurations supported. The Debian project aims at producing a software system with thousands of components running on eleven different hardware architectures, with three different operating system kernels. This paper describes the project and how the work of hundreds of people that never meet one with another can be coordinated to produce reasonably robust and integrated systems.
Keywords: debian

GlueTheos: Automating the Retrieval and Analysis of Data from Publicly Available Software Repositories - Gregorio Robles; Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona; Rishab Ayer Ghosh (Proceedings of the 2004 international workshop on Mining software repositories - MSR '04, 2004)
For efficient, large scale data mining of publicly available information about libre (free, open source) software projects, automating the retrieval and analysis processes is a must. A system implementing such automation must have into account the many kinds of repositories with interesting information (each with its own structure and access methods), and the many kinds of analysis which can be applied to the retrieved data. In addition, such a system should be capable of interfacing and reusing as much existing software for both retrieving and analyzing data as possible. As a proof of concept of how that system could be, we started sometime ago to implement the GlueTheos system, featuring a modular,flexible architecture which has been already used in several of our studies of libre software projects. In this paper we show its structure, how it can be used, and how it can be extended.

Group awareness in distributed software development - Schneider, Kevin; Gutwin, Carl; Penner, Reagan (2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '04, 2004)
Open-source software development projects are almost always collaborative and distributed. Despite the difficulties imposed by distance, these projects have managed to produce large, complex, and successful systems. However, there is still little known about how open-source teams manage their collaboration. In this paper we look at one aspect of this issue: how distributed developers maintain group awareness. We interviewed developers, read project communication, and looked at project artifacts from three successful open source projects. We found that distributed developers do need to maintain awareness of one another, and that they maintain both a general awareness of the entire team and more detailed knowledge of people that they plan to work with. Although there are several sources of information, this awareness is maintained primarily through text-based communication (mailing lists and chat systems). These textual channels have several characteristics that help to support the maintenance of awareness, as long as developers are committed to reading the lists and to making their project communication public.
Keywords: email; email archive; mailing list

Hacking Alone? The Effects of Online and Offline Participation on Open Source Community Leadership - Siobhan O'Mahony (2004)
Research on computer mediated communication has examined how a lack of social presence affects participation, communication and leadership in online groups, but until recently, has not examined offline relations or emergent social structures. The few studies examining these issues have not been integrated with research on open source communities. Online communities producing open source software face even greater problems of governance than affinity or interest based online communities, as leadership responsibilities extend beyond mailing list management to managing release dates, public relations, and collaborations with firms. With data from one open source community's online and offline networks over three consecutive years, we assess factors affecting voting participation and leadership. We find that the more developers one has met face to face, the more likely one was to vote in a leadership election. Controlling for contributions of code, developers are more likely to hold a top leadership position when they participate more in online discussions. However, online participation in technical discussions did not affect leadership as much as occupying a structurally advantaged position in the community's social network. We conclude with theoretical implications that consider the dynamics of online and offline networks for governing distributed online communities.

Hacking Practices and Software Development: A Social Worlds Analysis of ICT Innovation and the Role of Free/Libre Open Source Software - Yu-wei Lin (PhD Thesis, 2004)
Through use of social worlds theory and qualitative research methods, this thesis explores hackers' practices and their relationships with the computing world and the wider society from a socio-technical perspective. Through engaging with a constellation of open source practices (OSPs), actors and actants communicate, negotiate, and shape each other?s identities, practices and understandings of the innovation structure and system in various aspects. In examining the diverse articulations and performances in which hacker culture and hacker identity are both reflected and constructed, the thesis tries to contextualise and deconstruct the ICT architecture we take for granted, as well as the innovations made possible by this architecture.

How can Academic Software Research and Open Source Software Development help each other? - Ambati, V.; Kishore, S.P. (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
In this paper we discuss a few issues faced in coordinating, managing and implementing academic software research projects and suggest how some of these issues can be addressed by adopting tools and processes from Open Source Software Development. At the same time we also discuss how a few issues in Open Source Software Development (OSSD) projects can be addressed by adopting processes from Academic Software Research.
Keywords: academic; education

How effective developers investigate source code: An exploratory study - Robillard, M. P.; Coelho, W.; Murphy, G. C. (Ieee Transactions on Software Engineering, 2004)
Prior to performing a software change task, developers must discover and understand the subset of the system relevant to the task. Since the behavior exhibited by individual developers when investigating a software system is influenced by intuition, experience, and skill, there is often significant variability in developer effectiveness. To understand the factors that contribute to effective program investigation behavior, we conducted a study of five developers performing a change task on a medium-size open source system. We isolated the factors related to effective program investigation behavior by performing a detailed qualitative analysis of the program investigation behavior of successful and unsuccessful developers. We report on these factors as a set of detailed observations, such as evidence of the phenomenon of inattention blindness by developers skimming source code. In general, our results support the intuitive notion that a methodical and structured approach to program investigation is the most effective. Index Terms-Software evolution, empirical software engineering, program investigation, program understanding.

How Free Become Open and Everything Else Under the Sun - Biella Coleman (2004)
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has been adopted as a political tool by leftist activists. At the same time, it has been embraced by large corporations to extend profits and has been criticized as an integral force in late capitalism. It has been adopted by members of the growing Commons movement as a model for limiting the power of capitalism. This essay attempts to confront the variability of these relationships through a cursory analysis of each field and through an look at FOSS philosophy and practice. It argues that Free Software exists as a politically agnostic field of practice–built on and through a broadly defined philosophy. It analyzes the way that this philosophy is well suited for the spread of FOSS technologies and its translation into the terms of radically different, even oppositional, social and political movements.

How is Open Source affecting software development? - Diomidis Spinellis; Clemens Szyperski (2004)
Paper describes impact of using open source software in general development environments. (From the intro): " The dynamism of open source software development efforts, numerous high-profile success stories, and the novel economic, business, and legal aspects of open source software adoption are justifiably creating a stir in the development community. We software practitioners increasingly face the possibility of using or basing our work on open source components, libraries, frameworks, systems, platforms, and development environments."

How to Have a Successful Free Software Project - Anthony Senyard (2004)
Some free software projects have been extremely successful. This rise to prominence can be attributed to the high quality and suitability of the software. This quality and suitability is achieved through an elaborate peer-review process performed by a large community of users, who act as co-developers to identify and correct software defects and add features. Although this process is crucial to the success of free software projects, there is more to the free software development than the creation of a ?bazaar?. In this paper we draw on existing free software projects to define a lifecycle model for free software. This paper then explores each phase of the lifecycle model and agrees that, while the bazaar phase attracts the most attention, it is the initial modular design that accommodates diverse interventions. Moreover, it is the period of transition from the initial group to the larger community based development that is crucial in determining whether a free software project will succeed or fail.

Implicit theories of "good leadership" in the open-source community - Gianluca Bosco (2004)
The goal of this paper is to uncover the implicit theories (a.k.a. personal believes) of open-source developers concerning the characteristics and behaviors of a "good project leader". Three main behavioral factors are discovered to describe such implicit theories: competence, task orientation and person consideration. The conclusions of this study have been drawn from an analysis conducted on data gathered through 138 respondents.

Improving comprehension and cooperation through code structure - A. Capiluppi (IEE Seminar Digests, 2004)
Defining a relationship between a software system's architecture and the process' efforts is one of the most fascinating questions of software engineering. Apparently, when a system's architecture is complex, the process to improve and evolve it will be more difficult. We try to tackle this question from a different point of view: given an open source system, in all the phases of its evolution, we focus on both the aspects of software developers, and the obtained software product. More we observe one of the possible architectures of this system, based on the tree structure derived from source components. First conclusions show that some patterns of tree evolution are recognizable: some branches may appear more promising than other, and are extensively evolved, while other remains in the same status for all the life cycle. More, when the tree structure reaches some status, the process of joining as a core developer seems to forestall.
Keywords: arla; code structure; contributors; developers; open source system; scm; software development; software engineering; software process; software product; software system architecture; source code; source components; tree evolution; tree structure

In the network: Distributed control in Gentoo Linux - Østerlie, T. (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
This position paper reports on the findings of an empirical pilot study of Gentoo Linux. Gentoo Linux is an open source Linux distribution developed by a geographically distributed community of volunteers. The reported findings are based on the analysis of a specific episode using actor network theory. With basis in the analysis, it is argued that control in this specific episode can be interpreted as both distributed and local at the same time. Control here being the power to define a problem and make the decision about the appropriate solution to the problem defined. Control, it is argued, is distributed in that it is the function of reciprocal influence among several human and non-human actors. Furthermore, it is argued that control can be interpreted as not inherent in organizational structures or hierarchies, but locally embedded among actors in the decision making process.
Keywords: gentoo; linux

The influence of network governance factors on success in open source software development projects - Glen W. Sagers (Twenty-Fifth International Conference on Information Systems, 2004)

Inside an Open Source Software Community: Empirical Analysis on Individual and Group Level - Maass, W. (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
An established Open Source Software community (Apache Cocoon) was explored using an online questionnaire about demographic data and individual and group-related factors. Individual factors encompassed forms of contributions, motivation, expertise and knowledge. Role structures, expectations towards other members, trust and collaboration issues were analysed at group level. More than 60% of the developer community completed this questionnaire. Results provide a valuable basis for deeper understanding of knowledge sharing, collaboration and innovation processes in distributed work groups.
Keywords: apache; Survey

Internet Research: Privacy, Ethics and Alienation ? An Open Source Approach - David M. Berry (2004)
This paper examines some of the ethical problems involved in undertaking Internet research and draws on historical accounts as well as contemporary studies to offer an analysis of the issues raised. It argues that privacy is a misleading and confusing concept to apply to the Internet, and that the concept of non-alienation is more resourceful in addressing the many ethical issues surrounding Internet research. Using this as a basis, the paper then investigates the Free/Libre and Open Source research model and argues for the principles of ?open source ethics? in researching the online world, which includes a participatory and democratic research method.

Intrinsic Motivation in Open Source Software Development - Jurgen Bitzer (2004)
This papers sheds light on the puzzling evidence that even though open source software (OSS) is a public good, it is developed for free by highly qualified, young and motivated individuals, and evolves at a rapid pace. We show that once OSS development is understood as the private provision of a public good, these features emerge quite naturally. We adapt a dynamic private-provision-of-public-goods model to reflect key aspects of the OSS phenomenon. In particular, instead of relying on extrinsic motives for programmers (e.g. signaling) the present model is driven by intrinsic motives of OSS programmers, such as user-programmers, play value or homo ludens payoff, and gift culture benefits. Such intrinsic motives feature extensively in the wider OSS literature and contribute new insights to the economic analysis.

The Jukebox Mode of Innovation: a Model of Commercial Open Source Development - Joachim Henkel (2004)
In this paper, I explore the circumstances under which innovation processes without secrecy or intellectual property protection are viable, and where free revealing of innovations is a profit-maximizing strategy. Motivated by an empirical study of embedded Linux, I develop a duopoly model of quality competition. Firms require two complementary technologies as inputs, but differ with respect to the relative importance of these technologies. I find that a regime with compulsory revealing can lead to higher product qualities and higher profits than a proprietary regime. When the decision to reveal is endogenized, equilibria with voluntary revealing arise, again superior to the proprietary outcome.

LASER: a lexical approach to analogy in software reuse - Amin, R.; Mel O Cinneide; Veale, Tony (International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2004), 2004)
Software reuse is the process of creating a software system from existing software components, rather than creating it from scratch. With the increase in size and complexity of existing software repositories, the need to provide intelligent support to the programmer becomes more pressing. An analogy is a comparison of certain similarities between things which are otherwise unlike. This concept has shown to be valuable in developing UML-level reuse techniques. In the LASER project we apply lexically-driven Analogy at the code level, rather than at the UML-level, in order to retrieve matching components from a repository of existing components. Using the lexical ontology Word-Net, we have conducted a case study to assess if class and method names in open source applications are used in a semantically meaningful way. Our results demonstrate that both hierarchical reuse and parallel reuse can be enhanced through the use of lexically-driven Analogy.
Keywords: class; developers; functions; jrefactory; method; naming; natural language; reuse; source code; wordnet

Legal Issues for the Use of Free and Open Source Software in Government - Nic Suzor (2004)
This paper examines some of the legal issues that face the uptake of free and open source software in government in Australia. This paper was presented at the 'Linux and Open Source in Government' conference, part of Linux.Conf.Au 2004 in Adelaide, Australia.

Linux Adoption by Firms - Zheshi Peng (2004)
The objective of this study is to examine the evolution of the market for Linux based products for the 1993-2003 period. Using data on 317 Linux suppliers available online, the differences in firms? size and in their first products were explored across the adoption stages of the Linux life cycle. Then two temporal patterns of the Linux-market were identified: changes in the entry rate of new Linux suppliers and changes in product diversity. Finally, the attributes of the partnerships formed by four major Linux distributors were examined. The study determined whether the number of partnerships formed by Linux distributors was related to the number of new entrants, whether the motives for partnerships formed by Linux distributors varied over adoption stages, and whether the type of partner selected by Linux distributors was a function of partnership motive. This study builds on the literature on open source software and traditional theories of technology adoption to make three important contributions. First, it develops a method to identify the stages of the life of a new technology. Secondly, it provides a way to measure the temporal patterns of the evolution of a new market. Finally, it validates the densitydependence model using data on open source.

Managing Conflicts in Open Source Communities - Ruben van Wendel de Joode (Electronic Markets, 2004)
An increasing number of companies adopt open source software. These companies will typically pay programmers to participate in the design, development and maintenance of open source software. The programmers, however, are reported to have different interests compared to the voluntary programmers who dominate most open source communities. The diversity of interest will inevitably result in conflicts. To ensure that their interests are achieved, companies should understand how conflicts between their programmers and the voluntary programmers can be managed. The aim of this paper is to identify and discuss mechanisms that are currently present to manage conflicts in open source communities. The mechanisms identified in this paper are based on an explorative literature study and on 48 semi-structured interviews with programmers from a variety of open source communities. Four mechanisms have been identified and their relevance in the management of conflicts are discussed. They are: third-party intervention; modularity; parallel software development lines; and the exit option. The paper ends with an example of Covalent, which deploys parallel software development lines to manage conflicts in the Apache community.
Keywords: abiword; apache; conflict; covalent; interviews; organizational sponsorship; Volunteers

Managing Volunteer Activity in Free Software Projects - Martin Michlmayr (2004)
During the last few years, thousands of volunteers have created a large body of free software. Even though this accomplishment shows that the free software development model works, there are some drawbacks associated with this model. Due to the volunteer nature of most free software projects, it is impossible to fully rely on participants. Volunteers may become busy and neglect their duties. This may lead to a steady decrease of quality as work is not being carried out. The problem of inactive volunteers is intensified by the fact that most free software projects are distributed, which makes it hard to quickly identify volunteers who neglect their duties. This paper shows Debian's approach to inactive volunteers. Insights presented here can be applied to other free software projects in order to implement effective quality assurance strategies.
Keywords: debian; volunteer; volunteer teams

The many meanings of open source - Gacek, C.; Arief, B. (IEEE Software, 2004)
The term Open Source is widely applied to describe some software development methodologies. This paper does not provide a judgment on the open source approach, but exposes the fact that simply stating that a project is open source does not provide a precise description of the approach used to support the project. By taking a multi- disciplinary point of view, we propose a collection of characteristics that are common, as well as some that vary among open source projects. The set of open source characteristics we found can be used as a tick-list both for analysing and for setting up open source projects. Our tick-list also provides a starting point for understanding the many meanings of the term open source.
Keywords: classification; projects; taxonomy

Membership dynamics and network stability in the open-source community: the ising perspective - Oh, Wonseok; Jeon, Sangyong (International Conference on Information Systems 2004, 2004)
In this paper, we address the following two questions: (1)How does a participant’s membership decision affect the others (neighbors) with whom he has collaborated over an extended period of time in an open source software (OSS) network? (2) To what extent do network characteristics (i.e, size and connectivity) mediate the impact of external factors on the OSS participants’ dynamic membership decisions and hence the stability of the network? From the Ising perspective, we present fresh theoretical insight into the dynamic and reciprocal membership relations between OSS participants. We also performed simulations based on empirical data that were collected from two actual OSS communities. Some of the key findings include that (1) membership herding is highly present when the external force is weak, but decreases significantly when the force increases, (2) the propensity for membership herding is most likely to be seen in a large network with a random connectivity, and (3) for large networks, at low external force a random connectivity will perform better than a scale-free counterpart in terms of the network strength. However, as the temperature (external force) increases, the reverse phenomenon is observed. In addition, the scale-free connectivity appears to be less volatile than with the random connectivity in response to the increase in the temperature. We conclude with several implications that may be of significance to OSS stakeholders.
Keywords: email; email archive; hypermail; linux; mailing list; membership; membership herding; newsgroup; open source; participants; social network analysis; stakeholders; team size

Migrating a Development Project to Open Source Software Development - Bleek, W-G.; Finck, M. (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
The CommSy-system is a web-based community system, which has been in development since 1999 at the University of Hamburg. It has initially been developed by students and researchers in their spare time. Its last organizational setting was a publicly funded research project, which allowed for full-time and part-time developers. As that project has come to an end, we are aiming at an open source project to ensure continuity by providing a frame for people from different organizations. In this paper we discuss the characteristics of this specific project and of other open source projects to identify a strategy for migrating that particular project to open source. We outline the actions taken to migrate the existing project to open source software development and raise questions concerning the necessary characteristics of an open source project as well as whether the actions will suffice or not.

Mining CVS repositories, the softChange experience - German, Daniel (Proc. Int'l Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2004)
CVS logs are a rich source of software trails (information left behind by the contributors to the development process, usually in the forms of logs). This paper describes how softChange extracts these trails, and enhances them. This paper also addresses some challenges that CVS fact extraction poses to researchers.
Keywords: bugzilla; cvs; email archives; log files; logs; softchange

Mining version control systems for FACs (frequently applied changes) - Van Rysselberghe, F.; Demeyer, S (International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2004), 2004)
Today, programmers are forced to maintain a software system based on their gut feeling and experience. This paper makes an attempt to turn the software maintenance craft into a more disciplined activity, by mining for frequently applied changes in a version control system. Next to some initial results, we show how this technique allows to recover and study successful maintenance strategies, adopted for the redesign of long–lived systems.
Keywords: ccfinder; change analysis; change history; clone; clone detection; cvs; maintenance; tomcat; version control

Mobilization of Software Developers: The Free Software Movement - Margret Elliott (2004)
Free/open source software (F/OSS) development projects are growing at a rapid rate. Globally dispersed virtual communities with large groups of software developers contribute time and effort often without pay. One force behind this phenomenon is the Free Software Movement (FSM), a 20 year-old social movement whose purpose is to promote the use of free software instead of proprietary software. We show how the ideology of the FSM influences software development work practices in F/OSS communities and how an occupational community of F/OSS developers has emerged from this movement. We present results from an empirical study of a F/OSS development community, GNUenterprise (GNUe) whose purpose is to build an Enterprise Resource Planning system. We show how the beliefs in freedom and freedom of choice, and the values of cooperative work and community building are manifested in the GNUe norms of informal self-management, immediate acceptance of fellow contributors, and open disclosure.

Munich/MIT Suvey: Development of Embedded Linux - Joachim Henkel (2004)
The use of Linux in embedded devices has increased enormously in recent years. Most of the publicly available code for embedded Linux is developed and contributed by commercial firms, not by hobbyists. This raises the question if and how the development process differs from that of other OSS. This issue was addressed in a survey of embedded Linux developers yielding 268 valid responses. This paper is a collection of descriptive results from the survey.

Network Formation via Contests: The Production Process of Open Source Software - Jens Prufer (2004)
Why do both software developers and firms contribute to the production process of Open Source Software (OSS) despite not receiving direct monetary rewards for it? This papers extends results of the economic literature by modelling the OSS production process as an application contest to a "qualified network". The winners receive reputation and high investments. Investors searching for highly talented applicants profit from the selection mechanism of the OSS production process and finance it to receive inside information. We describe incentives for developers and firms and compare the mechanism with alternatives for its efficiency.

New tricks: how open source changed the way my team works - Lussier, S. (IEEE Software, 2004)
A commercial software team contributed to an open source implementation of the Windows API on X-Windows and Unix. Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows API, a compatibility layer that lets native windows programs run on X-Windows and Unix. With our contribution filling in some gaps, our client planned to include Wine with a slightly modified product. Expecting chaos in the organization and code, the team instead found a structured community with procedures all its own. The version control tool on the Wine team is CVS (concurrent version system), an open source, network-transparent version control system. Patches on Wine are relatively small, which makes them easier to review and less risky to add to the source tree.

New ventures based on open innovation - an empirical analysis of start-up firms in embedded Linux - Marc Gruber (2004)
An important and intriguing aspect of e-entrepreneurship is the formation of new ventures in the domain of open source software (OSS). Previous research on these ventures has primarily looked at the design of business models, yet has neglected other key questions relating to the management of these firms, despite clear indications that some existing insights on venture management cannot be applied to new ventures in OSS. The purpose of this paper is to explore how three key challenges of venture management - the liabilities of newness and smallness of start-ups and market entry barriers - affect new ventures in OSS. Based on empirical data from personal interviews and a large scale survey we find that many of the liabilities that are typically discussed in the entrepreneurship literature are much less of a challenge for new ventures in OSS. Our findings have interesting implications for the emerging theory on e-entrepreneurship, and for entrepreneurs considering to exploit business opportunities in OSS, and more generally business opportunities based on open innovations.

Open Source and Closed Source Software Development Methodologies - Potdar, V.; Chang, E. (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
Open source software development represents a fundamentally new concept in the field of software engineering. Open source development and delivery occurs over the Internet. Developers are not confined to a geographic area. They work voluntarily on a project of their choice. As new requirements emerge, the software is enhanced by the user/developers. In this paper we show a comparative study of open source and closed source software development approaches and present a software life cycle model for open source software development.
Keywords: life cycle; lifecycle

Open Source en el e-learning: ?Una cuesti?n de mente? - An?lisis del fen?meno del Open source en el e-learning, situaci?n actual y tendencias - Carlos Biscay (2004)
Primeramente vamos a ver ?Qu? es el Open source? ?Cu?les son sus objetivos y sus caracter?sticas fundamentales?. En segundo lugar haremos un recorrido hist?rico de los ?ltimos a?os, identificando los principales desarrollos del Open source y sus tendencias, especialmente en el ?rea de la educaci?n superior. En tercer lugar mostramos el Proyecto Sakai, donde un grupo de Universidades de Primer nivel est?n uniendo fuerzas para integrar y para sincronizar su software educativo en una colecci?n de herramientas de Open source para e-learning. A continuaci?n haremos mencionaremos los principales aplicaciones de OS en general. Seguidamente, he de tratar de poner de relieve los aspectos t?cnicos y psicol?gicos que est?n presentes en el Open Source y sus protagonistas y las razones econ?micas, pol?ticas y culturales que se vinculan o crean un contexto favorable al crecimiento de las soluciones de open source en el mercado y especialmente en mercado del e-learning. Finalmente y como s?ntesis de estas cuestiones describimos el caso concreto de la Universidad de Wisconsin, que actualmente junto a otras instituciones educativas se ha sumado en el proyecto Sakai.

Open Source Jarbuch 2004 (in German) - Robert A Gehring (2004)
The "Open Source Jahrbuch 2004" (open source yearbook 2004) is the first publication in German to cover the topic with an interdisciplinary approach. In contains contributions from practitioners as well as from scientists and aims to supply the reader with a comprehensive picture of how rich the open source phenomenon is. Open source means much more than only software. The subtitle of the book, "Zwischen Softwareentwicklung und Gesellschaftsmodell", i.e. "Between Software Development and Social Model", circumscribes the reach of this new way of dealing with information artefacts. The book is directed towards decision-makers from both politics and business as well as to scientists doing reasearch in this field. It delivers first-hand insights as a basis for understanding the potentials and constraints of open source.

Open source software development put in an impure public goods context - Federico Bertelli (2004)
The open source software development appears to be a problem of pure public goods contribution, but looking more in depth emerge the classic question posed by Lerner and Tirole: "Why should thousands of top-notch programmers contribute freely to the provision of a public good?". So, the aim of this research is to elaborate a model able to cope with the low level of free riding.

Open Source Software within organization - Critical factors for consulting - Thorsten Scherler (2004)
The consultation of enterprises and organizations regarding the correct implementation of modern information technology is an important segment on the modern consulting market. The main focus of this work is to conduct the consultation in consideration of the topic ?Introduction of Open Source e-Business Technologies?. Due to limited budget funds more and more enterprises are designing their value chain more cost-effective by using web based systems. Mostly all parts of the value chain can be supported by e-business technologies. To further reduce the costs this e-business technologies should be Open Source.

Open-Source Change Logs - Chen, Kai; Schach, Stephen R.; Yu, Liguo; Offutt, Jeff; Heller, Gillian Z. (Empirical Softw. Engg., 2004)
A recent editorial in Empirical Software Engineering suggested that open-source software projects offer a great deal of data that can be used for experimentation. These data not only include source code, but also artifacts such as defect reports and update logs. A common type of update log that experimenters may wish to investigate is the ChangeLog, which lists changes and the reasons for which they were made. ChangeLog files are created to support the development of software rather than for the needs of researchers, so questions need to be asked about the limitations of using them to support research. This paper presents evidence that the ChangeLog files provided at three open-source web sites were incomplete. We examined at least three ChangeLog files for each of three different open-source software products, namely, GNUJSP, GCC-g++, and Jikes. We developed a method for counting changes that ensures that, as far as possible, each individual ChangeLog entry is treated as a single change. For each ChangeLog file, we compared the actual changes in the source code to the entries in the ChangeLog file and discovered significant omissions. For example, using our change-counting method, only 35 of the 93 changes in version 1.11 of Jikes appear in the ChangeLog file—that is, over 62% of the changes were not recorded there. The percentage of omissions we found ranged from 3.7 to 78.6%. These are significant omissions that should be taken into account when using ChangeLog files for research. Before using ChangeLog files as a basis for research into the development and maintenance of open-source software, experimenters should carefully check for omissions and inaccuracies.
Keywords: change log; gcc; GCC-g; GNUJSP; Jikes; log files; Open-source software; source code

Organizational Structure of “User Collaboration Community”: Insights from the Case of an Open Source Software Project - Lee, J.F; Chan, T.Y (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
Current literatures on organization innovation do not investigate the innovation model which is composed of "network between individuals". Therefore, this study proposes the concept of the "User Collaboration Community", tries to understand this new phenomenon by conducting OSS project is the subject of this analysis, borrows the observation variables and propositions adopted by Mintzberg on structures of the innovative organization. This study further infers the conceptual framework and a series of hypothesis on the organizational structure of the user collaboration community. We expect that the proposition of this hypothesis will function as a concrete description and presentation of the innovation model of the "User Collaboration Community".

OSS Project Success: From Internal Dynamics to External Impact - Katherine Stewart (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
Success in open source software (OSS) development has been viewed in many different ways. This paper examines the relationship between success in terms of the development efforts devoted to an OSS project and success in terms of the acceptance of the software by stakeholders beyond the immediate development group. Research has discussed the importance of communication, norms, and other factors related to the dynamics of work within open source software development groups. The model proposed here suggests a positioning of these internal dynamics in a larger nomological net explaining variation in the success of OSS efforts.

Papers from Anthropological Quarterly (Vol 77, No 3) - Social Thought and Commentary: Culture's Open Source - Christoper Kelty (2004)
Listing of papers: Christopher M. Kelty | Culture's Open Sources: Software, Copyright, and Cultural Critique –- Gabriella Coleman | The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast –- Alex Golub | Copyright and Taboo –- Anita Chan | Coding Free Software, Coding Free States: Free Software Legislation and the Politics of Code in Peru–- Christopher M. Kelty | Punt To Culture–- Rosemary J. Coombe & Andrew Herman | Rhetorical Virtues: Property, Speech, and the Commons on the World-Wide Web–- Glenn Otis Brown | Commentary

Patterns of Free Revealing ? Balancing Code Sharing and Protection in Commercial Open Source Development - Joachim Henkel (2004)
Commercial firms increasingly contribute to the development of open source software (OSS). However, a conflict often arises between the requirements of the General Public License to make "derived work" available, and firms? interest to protect their intellectual property embodied in the code. If there are ways to mitigate or solve this conflict, the conditions under which OSS will be an appealing solution to firms become much more general. This paper is the first to provide a quantitative empirical study of this conflict and the ways firms deal with it. I present a study of embedded Linux, based on an online-survey that yielded 268 valid responses. It turns out that firms routinely use various means to protect their developments, while keeping the GPL. Still, they do reveal a considerable share of their code? on average, 49%. Heterogeneity between firms is analyzed using multivariate analysis. I show how the relative importance of various benefits and downsides of revealing determines a firm?s pattern of revealing. An analysis of reported reasons for revealing and of the type of code that is revealed provides further insights into these patterns. Putting the different dimensions of revealing behavior together, I find that consistent patterns of revealing can be identified for different types of firms.

The perils and pitfalls of mining SourceForge - Howison, James; Kevin Crowston (Proc. of Workshop on Mining Software Repositories at the International Conference on Software Engineering, 2004)
SourceForge provides abundant accessible data from Open Source Software development projects, making it an attractive data source for software engineering research. However it is not without theoretical peril and practical pitfalls. In this paper, we outline practical lessons gained from our spidering, parsing and analysis of SourceForge data. SourceForge can be practically difficult: projects are defunct, data from earlier systems has been dumped in and crucial data is hosted outside SourceForge, dirtying the retrieved data. These practical issues play directly into analysis: decisions made in screening projects can reduce the range of variables, skewing data and biasing correlations. SourceForge is theoretically perilous: because it provides easily accessible data items for each project, tempting researchers to fit their theories to these limited data. Worse, few are plausible dependent variables. Studies are thus likely to test the same hypotheses even if they start from different theoretical bases. To avoid these problems, analyses of SourceForge projects should go beyond project level variables and carefully consider which variables are used for screening projects and which for testing hypotheses.
Keywords: Data Collection; sourceforge

The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast - Coleman, E.G. (Anthropological Quarterly, 2004)

Political Motives of Developers for Collaboration on GNU/Linux - Tobias Escher (2004)
This paper examines to what degree developers of the collaboratively produced computer operating system GNU/Linux are politically motivated for their contributions. It first states that software is politically relevant. It then goes on to argue for the political significance of Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) and discusses the developers ambivalent attitude towards a politicisation of FS/OSS. Centrepiece is a survey carried out with 85 GNU/Linux developers that showed that most of them are conscious of the social relevance of FS/OSS and that their engagement is of a deliberately political nature.

Profiling an Open Source Project Ecology and Its Programmers - Koch, Stefan (Electronic Markets, 2004)
While many successful and well-known open source projects produce output of high quality, a general assessment of this development paradigm is still missing. In this paper, an online community of both small and large, successful and failed projects and their programmers is analysed mainly using the version-control data of each project, also according to their productivity and estimation of expended effort. As the results show, there are indeed significant differences between this cooperative development model and the commercial organization of work in the areas explored. Both open source software projects in their size and their programmers' effort differ significantly, and the evolution of projects' size over time seems in part to contradict the laws of software evolution proposed for commercial systems. Both the inequality of effort distribution between programmers and an increasing number of developers in a project do not lead to a decrease in productivity, opposing Brooks's Law. Effort estimation based on the COCOMO model for commercial organizations shows a large amount of effort expended for the projects, while a more general Norden-Rayleigh modeling shows a distinctly smaller expenditure. This proposes that either a highly efficient development is achieved by this self-organizing cooperative and highly decentralized form of work, or that the participation of users besides programming tasks is enormous and constitutes an economic factor of large proportions.
Keywords: affiliation network; brooks law; cocomo; effort estimation; evolution; productivity; project success; scm; size; time; version control

Release criteria for the Linux kernel - Glance, D.G. (First Monday, 2004)
Before software is released to its users, software developers will ensure that the software has met specified functional and technical requirements and that it is as free from bugs as possible. Users should be able to have a high degree of confidence that the software will perform as specified and without fault. With open source development practices such as those employed on the Linux kernel project, there are no detailed specifications and little formal testing processes. The questions, then, are what criteria, if any, are used in determining the suitability for release of a particular version of this software, and do users have any degree of confidence in the quality of that release of software? These questions were examined in this study using information from the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), the primary forum for discussion of development issues of the Linux kernel, and change logs submitted with version releases of the Linux kernel. It was determined that very little planning is employed in determining the release of a particular version of the software and that a version of the software is essentially a collection of source patches released at regular intervals with some stabilisation of the code base before each release. Very little attempt is made to verify that the code is bug free, and consequently, the code released is of a largely unknown level of quality. End users are left to decide for themselves the suitability and robustness of a particular version of the software.
Keywords: bugs; change log; linux; linux kernel; log files; mailing list; patches; quality; release history

Remote analysis and measurement of libre software systems by means of the CVSanaly tool - Gregorio Robles; Koch, Stefan; Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona (the 2nd ICSE Workshop on Remote Analysis and Measurement of Software Systems (RAMSS), 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2004)
Libre (free, open source) software is one of the paradigmatic cases where heavy use of telematic tools and user-driven software development are key points. This paper proposes a methodology for measuring and analyzing remotely big libre software projects using publicly-available data from their version control repositories. By means of a tool called CVSAnalY that has been implemented following this methodology, measurements and analyses can be made in an automatic and non-intrusive way, providing real-time and historical data about the project and its contributors.

Research Infrastructure for Empirical Science of F/OSS - Gasser, Les; Gabriel Ripoche; Sandusky, Robert J. (Proc. Intern. Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, 2004)
F/OSS research 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 data from many disparate sources (forums, code, bug reports, etc.) At present no means exist for assembling these data under common access points and frameworks for comparative, longitudinal, and collaborative research. Gathering and maintaining large F/OSS data collections reliably and making them usable present several research challenges. For example, current projects usually rely on “web scraping” or on direct access to 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 common needs and critical factors in F/OSS empirical research, and suggest orientations and recommendations for the design of a shared research infrastructure.
Keywords: data; Data Collection; empirical; infrastructure

Sharing and Creating Knowledge in Open-Source Communities The case of KDE - Andrea Hemetsberger (2004)
Our research suggests that knowledge is shared and created in online communities of practice through the establishment of processes and 'technologies' that enable virtual re-experience for the learners at various levels. It demonstrates that online communities of practice overcome the problem of tacit knowledge transformation through the usage of technological tools, task-related features, analogies and usage scenarios. Three questions guided our research. The first one concentrates on how community members organize content with regard to their daily routines that potentially transforms into knowledge for other members. Secondly, as open-source communities depend on attracting and socializing new members, we inquired how new members are enabled to accumulate the knowledge necessary for becoming a valued member. Thirdly, we asked how members co-create and conceptualize new ideas - create new knowledge - in absence of physical proximity. Re-experience is enabled by modular tasks and transactive group memory, rigid guidance of new members, openness and legitimate peripheral participation, asynchronous communication, and virtual experimentation. Empirical evidence is based on an ethnographic investigation of the KDE project community.

SimCode: Agent-based Simulation Modelling of Open-Source Software Development - Jean-Michel Dalle (2004)
We present an original modeling tool, which can be used to study the mechanisms by which free/libre and open source software developers' code-writing efforts are allocated within open source projects. It is first described analytically in a discrete choice framework, and then simulated using agent-based experiments. Contributions are added sequentially to either existing modules, or to create new modules out of existing ones: as a consequence, the global emerging architecture forms a hierarchical tree. Choices among modules reflect expectations of peer-regard, i.e. developers are more attracted a) to generic modules, b) to launching new ones, and c) to contributing their work to currently active development sites in the project. In this context, we are able - particularly by allowing for the attractiveness of "hot spots"– to replicate the high degree of concentration (measured by Gini coefficients) in the distributions of modules sizes. The latter have been found by empirical studies to be a characteristic typical of the code of large projects, such as the Linux kernel. Introducing further a simple social utility function for evaluating the mophology of "software trees," it turns out that the hypothesized developers' incentive structure that generates high Gini coefficients is not particularly conducive to producing self-organized software code that yields high utility to end-users who want a large and diverse range of applications. Allowing for a simple governance mechanism by the introduction of maintenance rules reveals that "early release" rules can have a positive effect on the social utility rating of the resulting software trees.

Social Forces and Constraint in the Attainment of Community Status - Daniel Stewart (2004)
A study of social forces at work within an online community of free software developers, this paper investigates the manner in which social forces exert pressure that initially shapes and defines an actor's status within the community, but eventually constrain that actor's movement within a status order. The results of empirical analyses at the dyad level show that, in the process of status attainment, community members tend to evaluate a focal actor's reputation according to publicly available social cues. Ironically, these same social cues eventually work to produce stability and constraint in an actor's status position by reducing heterogeneity in community status beliefs.

The social structure of Free and Open Source software development - Kevin Crowston; James Howison (Syracuse University School of Information Studies, 2004)
Metaphors, such as the Cathedral and Bazaar, used to describe the organization of FLOSS projects typically place them in sharp contrast to proprietary development by emphasizing FLOSS's distinctive social and communications structures. But what do we really know about the communication patterns of FLOSS projects? How generalizable are the projects that have been studied? Is there consistency across FLOSS projects? Questioning the assumption of distinctiveness is important because practitioner-advocates from within the FLOSS community rely on features of social structure to describe and account for some of the advantages of FLOSS production. To address this question, we examined 120 project teams from SourceForge, representing a wide range of FLOSS project types, for their communications centralization as revealed in the interactions in the bug tracking system. We found that FLOSS development teams vary widely in their communications centralization, from projects completely centered on one developer to projects that are highly decentralized and exhibit a distributed pattern of conversation between developers and active users.

SOS-ware DEVILS[Strategic Open Software DEVelopment ILlnesseS] - George Blanas (2004)
Certain categories of software play a strategic role in contemporary public and private organizations. While software use is accelerated and diffused to more and more people and organisations, software development follows a reverse trend where fewer players form oligopolies, with some of them having almost reached a state of monopoly in certain areas. The evil consequences of such an evolution can be numerous, some of them relate to economic and security dependence and some others to phenomena of knowledge dependence and hysteresis. Within the current paper, we formulate a general framework that categorises the types of illnesses in open strategic software development from a number of viewpoints and the types of damages that could be inflicted to organizations and states as a result of false expectations if these illnesses persist. Finally, we identify the areas where research is considered to be urgently needed.

SOS-ware [Strategic Open Software] Perspectives - George Blanas (2004)
Certain types of software play a strategic role in the development of the various aspects of organizational life. One of these roles is knowledge development that can act as a facilitator of economic diamonds. We review the characteristics of strategic software and we try to answer the question whether there can exist open software development that would be able to incorporate these characteristics. Based on this review, and on certain case studies, we present a theory, on how open software might be able to close the gaps in knowledge creation and usage - or the reverse, ie. to become a vehicle for an acceleration of this hysteresis.

Status Inertia:The Speed Imperative in the Attainment of Community Status - Paper published as Stewart, Daniel. 2005. "Social Status in an Open Source Community", American Sociological Review, 70:5. - Daniel Stewart (2004)
This paper examines the role of tenure in establishing social status within an online community of free software developers. As tenure increases, an actor's status becomes increasingly taken-for-granted, thus making it difficult for actors to generate mobility outside of their current social strata. The results of empirical analyses suggest that the broader community plays a major role in deciding one's social position-a judgment that can be made fairly quickly and decisively. Therefore, members of the community who desire high status should work quickly to establish a positive reputation or else run the risk of being cast into an inert low status social position.

Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations - Fernanda Viegas (2004)
The Internet has fostered an unconventional and powerful style of collaboration: wiki web sites, where every visitor has the power to become an editor. In this paper we investigate the dynamics of Wikipedia, a prominent, thriving wiki. We make three contributions. First, we introduce a new exploratory data analysis tool, the history flow visualization, which is effective in revealing patterns within the wiki context and which we believe will be useful in other collaborative situations as well. Second, we discuss several collaboration patterns highlighted by this visualization tool and corroborate them with statistical analysis. Third, we discuss the implications of these patterns for the design and governance of online collaborative social spaces. We focus on the relevance of authorship, the value of community surveillance in ameliorating antisocial behavior, and how authors with competing perspectives negotiate their differences. content of the page.

Theory Development for Organizational Platform of User Collaboration Innovation Community - Jen-Fang Lee (2004)
This study proposes the concept of the ?User Collaboration Innovation Community?, tries to understand this new phenomenon by conducting projects where the opening of source software is the subject of this analysis, borrows the observation variables and propositions adopted by Mintzberg on structures of the innovative organization, and summarizes the opinions of scholars of organizational economics, the relationship between property rights and organization performance. This study further infers a series of conceptual framework and propositions on the relationships among ?organization structure, property right, and organization innovation? for ?the organizational platform of the user collaboration innovation community?. We expect that the construction of this concept framework will function as a concrete description and presentation of the innovation model of the User Collaboration Innovation Community and will serve as a clear path to be followed for continuous research in the future.

Toward Collaborative Open-Source Technology Transfer - Jean-Michel Dalle; Guillame Rousseau (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
We analyze several occurrences of open-source technology transfer where research tools or prototypes developed in academic environments are transferred to private actors to be exploited economically. We enlight common characteristics which lead us to suggest that academic duality is a general consequence of the academic design of research tools and prototypes, and that the associated high transfer costs could be reduced first by implementing dual versioning using a dual licensing scheme, by associating a new academic public license with a traditional technology transfer one, and second through the transparent and shared maintenance of products built according to a dual architecture, as it would be precisely allowed by a dedicated collaborative development platform such as LibreSource.

Towards a Portfolio of FLOSS project Success Measures - Kevin Crowston; Hala Annabi; Howison, James; Chengetai Masango (Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering, International Conference on Software Engineering, 2004)
Project success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems research. However, conventional measures of project success are difficult to apply to Free/Libre Open Source Software projects. In this paper, we present an analysis of four measures of success applied to SourceForge projects: number of members of the extended development community, project activity, bug fixing time and number of downloads. We argue that these four measures provide different insights into the collaboration and control mechanisms of the projects.
Keywords: bug fixing; developers; downloads; project success; sourceforge; team; team size

Understanding consumers' collective action on the Internet - a definition and discussion of relevant concepts for research - Andrea Hemetsberger (2004)
This paper offers a new approach for understanding online collaboration and collective action of 'prosumers'. It is proposed here that theories of collective action and social representations theory, in particular, provide a theoretical framework for studying the structural and social context of online collaboration of consumers, the social actors involved, and how public discourse contributes to shared meaning creation and dissemination in online communities. Processes of naming, classifying, personalizing and institutionalization give their actions ontological reality and contribute to the sustainability of the common effort. An overview and definition of these processes and relevant influencing factors is given and possible indicators of these concepts in open-source communities are highlighted.

Usability Discussions in Open Source Development - Michael B Twidale (2004)
The public nature of discussion in open source projects provides a valuable resource for understanding the mechanisms of open source software development. In this paper we explore how open source projects address issues of usability. We examine bug reports of several projects to characterise how developers address and resolve issues concerning user interfaces and interaction design. We discuss how bug reporting and discussion systems can be improved to better support bug reporters and open source developers.

Version Control Tools: A Collaborative Vehicle for Learning in F/OS - Shaikh, M.; Cornford, T. (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
In this paper we explore how version control software participates in learning within free/open source activities (F/OS). We see F/OS in terms of a product, and a community of people engaged in the process of its development, with version control software at the centre of all three activities as they learn and innovate. Learning is analysed through the perspective provided by Bateson's Levels of Learning, a relational model that stresses collaboration and conflict as drivers of learning and showing how conflict resolution may lead to higher and more profound or significant learning.
Keywords: education

Viral Contracts or Unenforceable Documents? Contractual Validity of Copyleft Licenses - Andres Guadamuz-Gonzalez (2004)
This paper asks the question of whether copyleft free software licences constitute valid legal contracts, in particular with regards to the fact that it may create obligations through a distribution chain. There is increasing interest about the non-proprietary licence model expressed in popular documents such as the General Public Licence (GPL), but not enough work has been done in asking perhaps the most important question of all: are these contracts enforceable? Is there really a viral transmission of obligations? To do this the GPL licence will be analysed to try to determine whether or not the terms included are contractually valid.

Waiting for F/OSS: Coordinating the Production of Free/Open Source Software - Markku Stenborg (2004)
Trade-off between producing F/OSS module and free-riding is analyzed as game of war of attrition, in which modules developed and potential are heterogeneous. It may be optimal to produce "high-profile" module that creates reputation and signals programming ability. It may be optimal to volunteer strategically for "low-profile" module even if high-profile module is available to speed up development process and reduce costs of waiting. Even if waiting brings opportunity to free ride, there may be rush to develop high-profile module at the opportunity. Model provides explanation for how large-scale F/OSS projects can be coordinated without markets and prices nor hierarchies such as firms.

WebDAV based Open Source Collaborative Development Environment - Kim, S.; Pan, K.; Whitehead, J. (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
Open source projects are characterized by their distributed developers, openness, and use of a community-based development process. Successful open source projects such as Apache, Linux, and PHP have a web-based Collaborative Development Environment (CDE) that provides source code repository access, knowledge management, discussion lists, bug tracking, and user support. Distributed software development is also increasingly common for commercial software projects, and benefits from using web-based CDEs. GForge, derived from the SourceForge package, is an open web-based CDE that is seeing widespread open source and commercial use. To support remote authoring of web pages and file contents, as well as remote source code access, GForge uses several network protocols, including SSH/SFTP, CVS pserver, and FTP. These protocols inevitably introduce security risks and add administrative work. We modified GForge to eliminate use of FTP, SSH/SFTP, and CVS protocols, using instead a WebDAV-based integration. The new CDE, called Davenport, uses only the HTTP/WebDAV protocol, and HTTP/WebDAV replaces the other protocols without sacrificing functionality. In this paper we describe the architecture and features of Davenport, and show how WebDAV replaces existing network protocols. We discuss the future development directions of CDEs including integration of client side IDEs and using a CDE as a software test bed.

When Consumers Produce on the Internet: The Relationship between Cognitive-affective, Socially-based, and Behavioral Involvement of Prosumers - Andrea Hemetsberger (2004)
This article advances our understanding of the motivational sources for consumer involvement in online joint innovation. The 'free' or 'open-source' software movement is the largest socio-technical network and most visible empirical evidence of this new phenomenon. The paper promotes a behavioral view of involvement and offers a conceptualization and empirical evidence of the relationship between cognitive-affective, socially-based and behavioral involvement in online joint production. An Internet survey with 1486 contributors to open-source software revealed that the extent of behavioral involvement is strongly related to the structure and strength of relationships between different motivations. The relationship between concern for self and concern for others especially distinguishes the level of contribution to online projects.

Why developers participate in open source software projects: an empirical investigation - Il-Horn Hann; Jeff Roberts; Sandra Slaughter (International Conference on Information Systems 2004, 2004)
Keywords: Survey

Will the Open Source Movement Survive a Litigious Society? - Vijay K. Vemuri; Vince Bertone (Electronic Markets, 2004)
Since no one is willing to undertake costly research and development to create innovation, incentives in the form of patents were instituted to motivate R&D. In software development, contrary to economic intuition, open source software has emerged as a viable alternative source of innovation. The patenting system has performed reasonably well in enhancing many other technologies. Since the mid-1990s patenting of software and business methods is increasingly accepted in the United States. The legitimacy of many of these new patents is subject to controversy and debate. In this paper we examine the trend, rate of litigation and disposition of US patents in the US Federal Courts. We find that litigation rates of software and business method patents is four times that of all other patents and is increasing. A majority of patent litigations are not won by the perpetrator of the lawsuits. The open source software community is not immune to heightened patent litigations. Since software development is incremental, the paths of OSS and commercial development are entwined. The spillover of patent litigation into OSS may have disastrous consequences: It may increase the 'cost' of OSS, dissuade volunteer developers and make OSS less attractive to users.
Keywords: courts; INNOVATION; lawsuit; litigation; patents; software patents

Adaptive entry strategies under dominant standards: Hybrid business models in the Open Source software industry - Andrea Bonaccorsi (2003)
Although a growing body of literature is analysing Open Source software (OSS) issues, there is still lack of empirical data on the phenomenon and little is known about firms that enter the software industry by producing under the Open Source license scheme (Open Source firms). This paper is a contribution to fill this gap and focuses on the business models of these firms. We find significant heterogeneity among them, in particular many agents supply both proprietary and Open Source software. We present a model of adoption that studies the intra-firm diffusion of the new paradigm. Explanatory hypotheses are discussed analysing how the characteristics of the Open Source production mode and of network externalities in software demand shape the strategies of firms that entered the OSS field.

Addressing Challenges to Open Source Collaboration with the Semantic Web - Ankolekar, A.; Herbsleb, J. D.; Sycara, K. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Adopting Open-Source Software Engineering in Computer Science Education - Liu, C. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)
Keywords: education

The Allocation of Software Development Resources in 'Open Source' Production - Jean-Michel Dalle (2003)
The paper develops a stochastic simulation model capable of describing the decentralized, micro-level decisions that allocate programming resources both within and among open source/free software (OS/FS) projects, and which critically shape their growth. The core or behavioral kernel of our simulation tool is based on dynamic "growing" trees, and incorporates the effects of the reputational reward structure of OS/FS communities as characterized by Eric S. Raymond (1998). In this regard, our line of investigation also follows recent approaches associated with studies of academic researchers in ?open science? communities. For the purposes of this first step, we mainly focus on showing the ways in which the specific norms of the reward system and organizational rules can shape emergent properties of projects, and we also point to a validation in this framework of the often adovcated, but yet mainly empirical "release early" rule.

Alternative Routes in the Digital World: Open Source Software in Africa - Victor Van Reijswoud (2003)
Software allows people to work with computers. Operating Software controls the hardware components and application software provide tools to facilitate and support the users' work. Most of the softwares are owned by private people or companies and users by licenses to use the software. This type of software is called proprietary or closed source software since the user purchases a license for using the product and the actual product (source code). At present Microsoft and Oracle are the biggest producers of this type software in the world. In the two decades a new approach for software development is emerging. Open Source Software movement is built on the premise that better software is produced when everyone is allowed to modify and change the software. So, in stead of selling user licenses, the product (source code) is distributed. The article discusses the differences between Open and Closed Source Software and reasons that organizations in the African context should decide to embrace the Open Source Software initiative. Several emerging initiatives promoting the use of Open Source Software are considered.

Altruistic individuals, selfish firms? The structure of motivation in Open Source software - Andrea Bonaccorsi (2003)
A growing body of economic literature is addressing the incentives of the individuals that take part to the Open Source movement. However, empirical analyses focus on individual developers and neglect firms that do business with Open Source software (OSS). During 2002, we conducted a large-scale survey on 146 Italian firms supplying Open Source solutions in Italy. In this paper our data on firms? motivations are compared with data collected by the surveys made on individual programmers. We aim at analysing the role played by different classes of motivations (social, economic and technological) in determining the involvement of different groups of agents in Open Source

An analysis of Open Source production in Italy - Andrea Bonaccorsi (2003)
Final report of a survey on Italian firms that do business with Open Source software

Assessing Free/Open Source Software Quality - Samoladas, Ioannis (2003)
According to its proponents, one of the most acclaimed advantages of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) is its superior quality. However, this suggestion is an open issue, since there is little concrete evidence to justify whether F/OSS quality is indeed better or worse than that of proprietary software products. The general perspective of this article is to discuss the current status of F/OSS quality and to assess its performance in various aspects of quality, based on existing literature. Specifically, this article will provide some answers to various questions raised by the assertion concerning the quality of F/OSS. In this regard issues addressed in this article include the quality framework, through which F/OSS quality should be investigated and the performance of F/OSS in various quality factors within this quality framework. Answers to these issues are given by providing evidence from various research papers, empirical studies and reports based on experience about the quality of F/OSS products. The overall results seem to indicate that F/OSS has achieved an acceptable level of quality, although there is more to be done in order to outperform proprietary software.

On Automatic Categorization of Open Source Software - Kawaguchi, S.; Garg, P.K.; Matsushita, M.; Inoue, K. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Automating the Discovery and Modeling of Open Source Software Development Processes - Chris Jensen; Walt Scacchi (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Automating the measurement of open source projects - German, Daniel; Audris Mockus (Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering, 2003)
The proliferation of open source projects raises a number of vital economic, social, and software engineering questions that are subject of intense research. Based on experience analyzing numerous open source and commercial projects we propose a set of tools to support extraction and validation of software project data. Such tools would streamline empirical investigation of open source projects and make it possible to test existing and new theories about the nature of open source projects. Our soft- ware includes tools to extract and summarize information from mailing lists, CVS logs, ChangeLog files, and defect tracking databases. More importantly, it cross-links records from various data sources and identifies all contributors for a software change. We illustrate some of the capabilities by analyzing data from Ximian Evolution project.
Keywords: bug reports; bug tracking; changelog; cvs; defects; evolution; log files; logs; mailing list; scm; softchange; source code; ximian; ximian evolution

The availability of source code in relation to timely response to security vulnerabilities - John Reinke; Hossein Saiedian (Computers & Security, 2003)
Once a vulnerability has been found in an application or service that runs on a computer connected to the Internet, fixing that exploit in a timely fashion is of the utmost importance. There are two parts to fixing vulnerability: a party acting on behalf of the application's vendor gives instructions to fix it or makes a patch available that can be downloaded; then someone using that information fixes the computer or application in question. This paper considers the effects of proprietary software versus non-proprietary software in determining the speed with which a security fix is made available, since this can minimize the amount of time that the computer system remains vulnerable.
Keywords: bugtraq; cert; email; email archives; mailing list; security; vulnerability

Beyond Code: Content Management and the Open Source Development Portal - T. Halloran; W. Scherlis; Erenkrantz, J. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Beyond good and evil: why open source development for peer-to-peer networks does not necessarily equal to an open society is as imbalanced as copyright law and definitely is not going to make you a better person - Prodromos Tsiavos; Ian Hosein (European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2003), 2003)
This paper interrogates the claims that open source development is an ideal form of regulatory development. We begin by presenting the literature that offers a framework of modalities of regulation where code, along with laws, markets, and norms shape and influence individual action. Within this framework, it is argued that for an Open Society we need Open Code. We present the processes through which the Gnutella protocol and the Limewire application are developed by deconstructing the mechanisms of participation and contribution of the individual developers. The techniques of monitoring, modularization and filtering that we identify appear to be inconsistent with open society promises. Instead we suggest a different framing, that of creating nests of interests, whose creators can find refuge from inhabitants of other nests. From that perspective, we suggest that we should stop referring to the war between Copyright and peer-to-peer networks as the battle between good and evil.
Keywords: bug reports; cvs; design documents; discussion; discussion forums; documentation; forums; gnutella; issuezilla; limewire; web site

The Big Project That Never Ends': Role and Task Negotiation Within an Emerging Occupational Community - Chip McCormick (2003)
This dissertation involved in-depth interviews of over fifty open source developers in two major open source projects. The primary areas of interest were 1) conducting an ethnographic study of the work practices and culture of 'post-burecratic' organizations to see what lessons these groups may hold for managing intellectual labor and 2) examining whether the open source movement represents a new professional model for software engineering.

Blogging the Market - George Dafermos (2003)
Weblogs have been recently characterised as the "open source media". And in much the same way that open source software is been deployed, marketed and sold within both commercial and non-commercial contexts, weblogs can advance both commercial and non-commercial objectives. However, in this primary - research paper, the focus is on the benefits that organisations can seize by embracing weblogs, and how weblogs are bound to revitalise marketplace and workplace conversations. In addition, several case studies are being analysed, ranging from Slashdot and Openflows to Amazon, Macromedia, Groove Networks, and Gizmodo.

Capability Coordination in Modular Organization: Voluntary FS/OSS Production and the Case of Debian GNU/Linux - Giampaolo Garzarelli (2003)
The paper analyzes voluntary Free Software/Open Source Software (FS/OSS) organization of work. The empirical setting considered is the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. The paper finds that the production process is hierarchical notwithstanding the modular (nearly decomposable) architecture of software and of voluntary FS/OSS organization. But voluntary FS/OSS project organization is not hierarchical for the same reasons suggested by the most familiar theories of economic organization: hierarchy is justified for coordination of continuous change, rather than for the direction of static production. Hierarchy is ultimately the overhead attached to the benefits engendered by modular organization.

Chapter 1- Networks of Innovation: Change and Meaning in the Age of the Internet (Oxford University Press) - Ilkka Tuomi (2003)
Integrating concepts from multiple theoretical disciplines and detailed analyses of the evolution of Internet-related innovations (including computer networking, the World Wide Web and the Linux open source operating system), this book develops foundations for a new theoretical and practical understanding of innovation. It includes a detailed analysis of the Linux open source development model." The table of contents, references, and other related material is available here

Characteristics of Open Source Projects - Capiluppi, Andrea; Patricia Lago; Maurizio Morisio (7th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR'03), 2003)
Most empirical studies about Open Source (OS)projects or products are vertical and usually deal with the flagship, successful projects. There is a substantial lack of horizontal studies to shed light on the whole population of projects, including failures. This paper presents a horizontal study aimed at characterizing OS projects. We analyze a sample of around 400 projects from a popular OS project repository. Each project is characterized by a number of attributes. We analyze these attributes statically and over time. The main results show that few projects are capable of attracting a meaningful community of developers. The majority of projects is made by few (in many cases one) person with a very slow pace of evolution.
Keywords: evolution; project success; repository

Clustering and Dependencies in Free/Open Source Software Development: Methodology and Tools - Rishab Ayer Ghosh (2003)
This paper addresses the problem of measurement of non-monetary economic activity, specifically in the area of free/open source software communities. It describes the problems associated with research on these communities in the absence of measurable monetary transactions, and suggests possible alternatives. A class of techniques using software source code as factual documentation of economic activity is described and a methodology for the extraction, interpretation and analysis of empirical data from software source code is detailed, with the outline of algorithms for identifying collaborative authorship and determining the identity of coherent economic actors in developer communities. Finally, conclusions are drawn from the application of these techniques to a base of software.
Keywords: scm; source code; source code analysis

Code, Coding and Coded Perspectives - L. Jean Camp (2003)
Building on computer science I consider code (as opposed to the Web, an instantiation of code) as a new technology of communication. Using the historical and sociological analyses of others, which have examined the results of print on perspectives and society, I offer four scenarios for the results of code. The four scenarios focus on the results of code on quantitative thought: the divergence of scientific perspective with popular reasoning resulting in reduced innovation; a broad-based popular explosion in innovation expanding the basis of reasoning; cypto-anarchy with those empowered by science corrupted with the power; and a loss of certainty of information with a return to tribalism. The last suggests a new era of ignorance, a moment in modern Dark Ages – in that an excess of the light of information causes blindness as effectively as its absence. The openness of code is a determinant in the resulting social structure.

Collective Action and Communal Resources in Open Source Software Development:The Case of Freenet - Georg von Krogh (2003)
Building on resource mobilization theory, we explore three distinct rewards for individuals to engage in innovative collective action, namely open source software development. The three rewards, which we term communal resources, are reputation, control over technology, and learning opportunities. The collective action (the open source software development project) produces the communal resources in parallel with the actual product (software) and mobilizes programmers to spend time and effort, and contribute their knowledge to the project. Communal resources appear as a byproduct to the production process and represent a public good of second order. We show that they increase in value for individuals along with their involvement in the community. Empirical data from Freenet, an open source software project for peer-to-peer software, illustrates both the levels of involvement and the communal resources.

Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study - Georg von Krogh; Spaeth, S.; Karim R Lakhani (Research Policy, 2003)
This paper develops an inductive theory of the open source software innovation process by focussing on the creation of Freenet, a project aimed at developing a decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer electronic file sharing network. We are particularly interested in the strategies and processes by which new people join the existing community of software developers, and how they initially contribute code. Analyzing data from multiple sources on the Freenet software development process, we generate the constructs of "joining script", We are grateful to helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers. We also thank Chris Argyris, John Seely Brown, Eric von Hippel, Stefan Haefliger, Petra Kugler, Heike Bruch, Simon Gchter, Simon Peck, and Hari Tsoukas for helpful comments and suggestions. Ben Ho and Craig Lebowitz provided technical assistance with data importation and parsing. We would like to thank Ian Clarke and the Freenet developers for their willingness to participate in our study and providing key insights into the open source development process. Karim R. Lakhani would like to acknowledge the generous support of The Boston Consulting Group and Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council doctoral fellowship. Georg von Krogh and Sebastian Spaeth acknowledge the generous support from the Research Foundation at the University of St. Gallen.
Keywords: cvs; email; email archives; freenet; INNOVATION; mailing lists; roles; source code

Community, Joining, and Specialization in Open Source Software Innovation: A Case Study - Georg von Krogh (RP Special Issue, 2003)
This paper develops an inductive theory of the open source software innovation process by focussing on the creation of Freenet, a project aimed at developing a decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer electronic file sharing network. We are particularly interested in the strategies and processes by which new people join the existing community of software developers, and how they initially contribute code. Analyzing data from multiple sources on the Freenet software development process, we generate the constructs of "joining script", "specialization", "contribution barriers", and "feature gifts", and propose relationships among these. Implications for theory and research are discussed.

Comparing motivations of individual programmers and firms to take part in the Open Source movement. From community to business - Andrea Bonaccorsi (2003)
A growing body of economic literature is addressing the incentives of the individuals that take part to the Open Source movement. However, empirical analyses focus on individual developers and neglect firms that do business with Open Source software (OSS). During 2002, we conducted a large-scale survey on 146 Italian firms supplying Open Source solutions in Italy. In this paper our data on firms? motivations are compared with data collected by the surveys made on individual programmers. We aim at analysing the role played by different classes of motivations (social, economic and technological) in determining the involvement of different groups of agents in Open Source activities.

Continuous Design of Free/Open Source Software: Workshop Report and Research Agenda - Gasser, Les; Walt Scacchi (UCI-UIUC Workshop on Continuous Design of Open Source Software, 2003)

Contributing to the common pool resources in Open Source software. A comparison between individuals and firms - Andrea Bonaccorsi (2003)
This paper studies the contributions to Open Source projects of software firms. Our goal is to analyse whether they follow the same regularities that characterize the behaviour of individual programmers. An exhaustive empirical analysis is carried out using data on project membership, project coordination and contribution efforts of 146 Italian firms that do business with Open Source software. We follow a meta-analytic approach comparing our findings with the results of the surveys conducted on Free Software programmers. Moreover, the availability of the data gathered by Hertel et al. (2003) on 141 developers of the Linux kernel will allow direct comparisons between the two sets.
Keywords: developers; linux; linux kernel; Survey

The Contribution of Free Software to Software Evolution - Andreas Bauer (2003)
t is remarkable to think that even without any interest in finding suitable methods and concepts that would allow complex software systems to evolve and remain manageable, the ever growing open source movement has silently managed to establish highly successful evolution techniques over the last two decades. These concepts represent best practices that could be applied equally to a number of today?s most crucial problems concerning the evolution of complex commercial software systems. In this paper, the authors state and explain some of these principles from the perspective of experienced open source developers, and give the rationale as to why the highly dynamic free software development process, as a whole, is entangled with constantly growing code bases and changing project sizes, and how it deals with these successfully.

A critical approach to Open Source Software - Stefan Gorling (2003)
The purpose of this masters' thesis was to discuss a number of assumptions regarding the benefits of Open Source software projects. By studying what has been written about Open Source combined with a number of own data collections, this thesis argues that: Brooks law is still valid in Open Source projects; Many Open Source projects are failures; Open Source culture is a product of the 90s, not the 70s Open Source is no guarantee for reduced lock-in effects; Our most famous Open Source projects are not built up by nerds working for free, but professionals, employed by commercial companies to contribute to the projects; Large Open Source projects are often hierarchical and bureaucratic Opening your source does not automatically lead to a large number of contributors; Open Source breeds diversity, not a single winner; Open Source projects often targets the community itself, rather than external actors; Companies benefiting from Open Source are often based on traditional business models rather than revolutionary visions. Open Source is not necessarily an efficient way to develop software.

Cyberscience: Research in the Age of the Internet - Michael Nentwich (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2003)

Defining Open Source Software Project Success - Kevin Crowston; Hala Annabi; James Howison (Twenty-Fourth International Conference on Information Systems, 2003)
Information systems success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems research. In this paper, we identify a range of measures that can be used to assess the success of open source software (OSS) projects. We identify measures based on a review of the literature, a consideration of the OSS development process and an analysis of the opinions of OSS developers. For each measure, we provide examples of how they might be used in a study of OSS development.

Determining the Distribution of Maintenance Categories: Survey versus Measurement - Jin Schach (2003)
In 1978, Lientz, Swanson, and Tompkins ("LST") published the results of a survey on software maintenance. They found that 17.4% of maintenance effort was categorized as corrective in nature, 18.2% as adaptive, 60.3% as perfective, and 4.1% was categorized as other. We contrast this survey-based result with our empirical results from the analysis of data for the repeated maintenance of a commercial real-time product and two open-source products, the Linux kernel and GCC. For all three products and at both levels of granularity we considered, our observed distributions of maintenance categories were statistically very highly significantly different from LST. In particular, corrective maintenance was always more than twice the LST value.

Distributed Collective Practices and F/OSS Problem Management: Perspective and Methods - Gasser, Les; Gabriel Ripoche (Conference on Cooperation, Innovation & Technology (CITE 2003), 2003)
This paper presents the state of our research on Distributed Collective Practices (DCPs) in Free/Open-Source Software (F/OSS) projects, focusing on sensemaking and resolution of software problems. We are exploring the hypothesis that variations in the content and in the articulation of these socio-technical processes have an impact on the outcome of the activity of F/OSS collectives, and more specifically on problem resolution. Our preliminary techniques for combining qualitative data analysis with automated process extraction result in a scalable analysis method called Computational Amplification (CA). We are applying CA to 128,000 problem reports from the Mozilla F/OSS project. The paper illustrates how CA is used to create multidimensional process models and shows types of conclusions we can reach.
Keywords: Automated process extraction; bug fixing; bug reports; bugzilla; Collective knowledge management; Information extraction from natural language texts; mozilla; Software problem management

Dual Licensing in Open Source Software Industry - Mikko Valimaki (2003)
This paper analyses how several open source companies use dual licensing: both open source and proprietary licenses for one product. Three case studies based on the experiences of companies Sleepycat Software Inc., MySQL AB, and TrollTech AS illustrate the issue. Especially the legal and economic requirements of dual licensing are identified.

Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows - Ramon Casadesus-Masanell (2003)
This paper analyzes a dynamic mixed duopoly in which a profit-maximizing competitor interacts with a competitor that prices at zero (or marginal cost), with the cumulation of output affecting their relative positions over time. The modeling effort is motivated by interactions between Linux, an open-source operating system, and Microsofts Windows in the computer server segment, and consequently emphasizes demand-side learning effects that generate dynamic scale economies (or network externalities). Analytical characterizations of the equilibrium under such conditions are offered, and some comparative static and welfare effects are examined.

The Ecology of Open Source Software Development - Kieran Healy (2003)
A number of theories have emerged to explain the success of open source software, mainly from economics and law. We analyze a very large sample of OSS projects and find striking patterns in the overall structure of the development community. The distribution of projects on a range of activity measures is spectacularly skewed, with only a relatively tiny number of projects showing evidence of the strong collaborative activity which is supposed to characterize OSS. Our findings are consistent with prior, smaller-scale empirical research. We argue that these findings pose problems for the dominant accounts of OSS. We suggest that the gulf between active and inactive projects may be explained by social-structural features of the community which have received little attention in the existing literature. We suggest some hypotheses that might better predict the observed ecology of projects.

An Economic Theory of Free and Open Source Software: A Tour from Lighthouse to Chinese-Style Socialism (revised version) - Benjamin Hak-Fung Chiao (2003)
The theory is that free and open source software is private property under the guise of common property. Such software is distributed mostly under the GNU General Public License. The intents in The GNU Manifesto suggest striking similarities between this license and communism. The resulting economic properties, however, are similar to those of Chinese-style socialism: both resulted from an increased separation of legal and economic ownership. The phenomenal growth of China in the last twenty five years and of such software in the past few years could be attributed to such separation.

The Economics of Free Software for a Competitive Firm - Richard Hawkins (2003)
This paper builds a simple economic model of the profit seeking firm with a choice between producing an open source and proprietary solutions. Differences between public and viral licenses are discussed from the firm's perpective. Advocacy issues are omitted entirely, and the model requires no math beyond subtraction. The decision of a firm to adopt an open source product rather than purchase is also discussed, but is seen as a trivial and uninteresting problem.

Episodes of Collective Invention - Peter Meyer (2003)
The process of developing technology through open discussion has been called collective invention. Open source software projects have this form. This paper documents two earlier episodes of collective invention and proposes a general model based on search theory. One episode was the development of mass production steel in the U.S. (1866-1885), and the second with early personal computers (1975-1985). Technical people openly discussed and shared these developing technologies between firms. Collective invention episodes begin with an invention or a change in legal restrictions. Hobbyists and startup firms experiment with practical methods of production and share their results through a social network whose members gradually form a new industry.

Evidences in the evolution of OS projects through Changelog Analyses - Capiluppi, Andrea (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)
Most empirical studies about Open Source (OS) projects or products are vertical and usually deal with the flagship, successful projects. There is a substantial lack of horizontal studies to shed light on the whole population of projects, including failures. This paper presents a horizontal study aimed at characterizing OS projects. We analyze a sample of around 400 projects from a popular OS project repository. Each project is characterized by a number of attributes. We analyze these attributes statically and over time. The main results show that few projects are capable of attracting a meaningful community of developers. The majority of projects is made by few (in many cases one) person with a very slow pace of evolution. We then try to observe how many projects count on a substantial number of developers, and analyze those projects more deeply. The goal is to achieve a better insight in the dynamics of open source development. The initial results of this analysis, especially growth in code size and tendency to stability in modularity, seem to be in line with traditional close source development.
Keywords: classification; freshmeat; loc; modularity; repository; size; sloc; source code

Free Software Developers as an Occupational Community: Resolving Conflicts and Fostering Collaboration - Elliott, Margaret; Walt Scacchi (GROUP ’03 Conference, 2003)
In this paper, we present results from the study of a free software development virtual organization, the GNU Enterprise (GNUe) project, and how they develop soft ware in a globally distributed free software development project. In particular, examples of how they mitigate and resolve conflict are presented. Conflict arises over the use of a non-free tool to create GNUe graphic, and over the use of a non-free tool for GNUe documentation. The GNUe developers resolve the conflict using internet relay chat (IRC), threaded email discussions, and community digests. We characterize the GNUe developers as an occupational subculture within the occupational community of free/open source software (F/OSS) developers and show how the beliefs in free software and freedom of choice, and values in cooperative work and community assist GNUe contributors in mitigating and resolving conflict. In addition, we show how, despite fluctuating boundaries of membership in a virtual organization, daily discussions on the GNUe IRC serve to build and perpetuate the global community of GNUe contributors as well as F/OSS developers in general.

Free Software Development: A Case Study of Software Development in a Virtual Organizational Culture - Margret Elliott (2003)
This study examines how organizational cultural beliefs and values of a free software virtual organization influence software development processes. This study shows how these beliefs and values are manifested in software development methods, artifacts, and tool choice, as well as how dispersed developers cooperate and resolve conflict in a virtual community.

Free software engineering: A field to explore - Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona (2003)
The challenge of free software is not that of a new competitor who, under the same rules, produces software faster, cheaper and of a better quality. Free software differs from "traditional" software in more fundamental aspects, starting with philosophical reasons and motivations, continuing with new economic and market rules and ending up with a different way of producing software. Software Engineering cannot ignore this phenomenon, and the last five years or so has seen ever more research into all these issues. This article takes a look at the most significant studies in this field and the results they are producing, with a view to providing the reader with a vision of the state of the art and the future prospects of what we have come to call free Software Engineering.

Free/Open Source Software Development Practices in the Computer Game Community - Walt Scacchi (2003)
This paper provides results from empirical studies that begin to outline some of the processes and practices for how F/OSS systems are developed in different communities. Examples drawn from the world of computer games reveal how processes and practices for the development and propagation of F/OSS technology are intertwined and mutually situated to benefit those motivated to use and contribute to it.

From a Firm-Based to a Community-Based Model of Knowledge Creation: The Case of the Linux Kernel Development - Lee, Gwendolyn K.; Cole, Robert E. (Organization Science, 2003)
We propose a new model of knowledge creation in purposeful, loosely coordinated, distributed systems, as an alternative to a firm-based one. Specifically, using the case of the Linux kernel development project, we build a model of community-based, evolutionary knowledge creation to study how thousands of talented volunteers, dispersed across organizational and geographical boundaries, collaborate via the Internet to produce a knowledge-intensive, innovative product of high quality. By comparing and contrasting the Linux model with the traditional/commercial model of software development and firm-based knowledge creation efforts, we show how the proposed model of knowledge creation expands beyond the boundary of the firm. Our model suggests that the product development process can be effectively organized as an evolutionary process of learning driven by criticism and error correction. We conclude by offering some theoretical implications of our community-based model of knowledge creation for the literature of organizational learning, community life, and the uses of knowledge in society.
Keywords: credits; developers; email; email archives; knowledge creation; linux kernel; mailing list; maintainers; scm; source code; Survey; Volunteers

Gift economies in the development of open source software: Anthropological reflections - David Zeitlyn (RP Special Issue, 2003)
Building on Eric Raymond?s work this article discusses the motivation and rewards that lead some software engineers to participate in the open source movement. It is suggested that software engineers in the open source movement may have sub-groupings which parallel kinship groups such as lineages. Within such groups gift giving is not necessarily or directly reciprocated, instead members work according to the ?axiom of kinship amity? ? direct economic calculation is not appropriate within the group. What Bourdieu calls ?symbolic capital? can be used to understand how people work in order to enhance the reputation (of themselves and their group).

Guarding the Commons: How Community Managed Software Projects Protect Their Work - Siobhan O'Mahony (Research Policy, 2003)
Theorists often speculate why open source and free software project contributors give their work away. Although contributors make their work publicly available, they do not forfeit their rights to it. Community managed software projects protect their work by using several legal and normative tactics, which should not be conflated with a disregard for or neglect of intellectual property rights. These tactics allow a project?s intellectual property to be publicly and freely available and yet, governable. Exploration of this seemingly contradictory state may provide new insight into governance models for the management of digital intellectual property.
Keywords: Common Pool Resources; email; email archives; intellectual property; mailing list; open source; Public Goods; Software; Survey

How Firm Initiation and Control of Projects Affects Open-Source Development - Anthony Long (2003)
After witnessing the success of open-source projects such as Linux and Apache, firms have sought to appropriate the open-source development model and integrate it into their own projects. Firms face a dilemma, however, since their initiation and control of open-source projects affects the traditional open-source development model in significant ways. Once a firm takes the role of starting and guiding an open-source project, the open-source development model that attracted the firm is forever altered. This paper examines the effects commercial firms have on the open-source development model when they initiate and control open-source projects.

How Open is Open Enough? Melding Proprietary and Open Source Platform Strategies - Joel West (RP Special Issue, 2003)
Computer platforms provide an integrated architecture of hardware and software standards as a basis for developing complementary assets. The most successful platforms were owned by proprietary sponsors that controlled platform evolution and appropriated associated rewards. Responding to the Internet and open source systems, three traditional vendors of proprietary platforms experimented with hybrid strategies which attempted to combine the advantages of open source software while retaining control and differentiation. Such hybrid standards strategies reflect the competing imperatives for adoption and appropriability, and suggest the conditions under which such strategies may be preferable to either the purely open or purely proprietary alternatives.

How open is open enough? Melding proprietary and open source platform strategies - Joel West (Research Policy, 2003)

How open source software works: "free" user-to-user assistance - Karim R Lakhani; von Hippel, Eric (Research Policy, 2003)
Research into free and open source software development projects has so far largely focused on how the major tasks of software development are organized and motivated. But a complete project requires the execution of "mundane but necessary" tasks as well. In this paper, we explore how the mundane but necessary task of field support is organized in the case of Apache web server software, and why some project participants are motivated to provide this service gratis to others. We find that the Apache field support system functions effectively. We also find that, when we partition the help system into its component tasks, 98% of the effort expended by information providers in fact returns direct learning benefits to those providers. This finding considerably reduces the puzzle of why information providers are willing to perform this task "for free." Implications are discussed.
Keywords: apache; help; logs; MOTIVATION; participants; Survey; usenet

The identity crisis within the IS discipline: Defining and communicating the discipline’s core properties - Izak Benbasat; Robert W. Zmud (MIS Quarterly, 2003)

Improving Verification, Validation, and Test of the Linux Kernel: the Linux Stabilization Project - Craig Thomas (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

The Individual and the Collective in Open Information Communities - Philippe Aigrain (2003)
This paper is the written version of an invited talk at the 16th Bled Electronic Conference, Slovenija, June 2003. The text focuses on 2 critical issues for open information communities: how lowering transactions costs linked to becoming an active contributor is an essential factor for their success; and how free (as in freedom) licenses enable new forms of relationships between the individual and the collective. I bring some evidence that this permits to overcome some of the traditional limitations of commons in the physical world. The analysis uses as examples the free Wiki-based encyclopedia Wikipedia and the peer-reviewed free encyclopedia Nupedia, the Slashdot technical news community (commercial), and Web sites using the SPIP free co-operative publishing software.

Intellectual Property, Open Source and Free Software - Tere Vadén (2003)
The notion of intellectual property is used in order to create digital commodities. While the commodification of code is useful for certain kinds of knowledge intesive work (the Taylorist forms), it severely disrupts other types of knowledge creation. Applying Scott Lash's division of knowledge creation into organisational and disorganisational types, we also gain insight into the different positions towards IP held by different wings of the FOSS community.

An Introduction to Open Source Communities - Eugene Eric Kim (Blue Oxen Associates, 2003)
This report describes what open source communities are and how they work. It cites relevant research and presents original case studies of two open source projects: TouchGraph and SquirrelMail. It then identifies patterns of collaboration shared by these projects, and describes how these patterns might apply to other types of communities. Finally, it reviews what is still not well understood about open source communities, and proposes several paths for further research.
Keywords: free software foundation directory; freshmeat; fsf; sourceforge; squirrelmail; touchgraph

Issues and Experiences in Modeling Open Source Software Development Processes - Walt Scacchi (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Issues in Implementing an Open Source-based XML Repository Manager for Application Maintenance and Adaptation - Galatscu, A.; Florian, V.; Costea, L.; Conescu, D. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Kategorisierung von Open Source Projekten: Aufbau- und Ablauforganisation (in german) - Categorization of Open Source Projects: Operational and Organizational Structure - Martin Matuska (2003)
The number of open source projects is growing. The largest part can be found on large develompent portals. But open source is not open source, each project has unique characteristics. This paper examines operational and organizational characteristics, licencing, communication and documentation specifications of open source projects and explains the trove categorization model introduced by SourceForge.net.

The Knowledge Ecology of Open-Source Software Projects - Giovan R Lanzara (2003)
In this paper we characterize the processes of knowledge making in open-source software projects as an ecology of agents, artifacts, rules, resources, activities, practices and interactions. In order to grasp its dynamic features we consider open-source software projects as interactive systems based on dense interactions between humans and technical artifacts within electronic media. Technology, rather than formal or informal organization, embodies most of the conditions for governance in open-source software projects, hence becoming a critical pathway to the understanding of collective task accomplishment, coordination and knowledge making processes. Based on an in-depth analysis of two open-source software projects, we examine three kinds of artifacts, respectively inscribing technical, organizational, and institutional knowledge. Our preliminary findings support the ecological view, that the contradictory requirements of innovation and stability in project-based knowledge making are balanced by mechanisms of variation, selection, and stabilization.

Knowledge Transfer in R&D Outsourcing (and Linux-Vs-Windows) - Salvatore Modica (2003)
Why did Microsoft not hire all those smart programmers who ended up developing Linux through the internet? Because, we answer, the value of the information about its operating system that Microsoft should have transferred to any of them to render her productive would have been too high compared to her expected individual contribution, so that after writing a contract with Microsoft the typical developer would have run away to sell the acquired knowledge on the market. On the other hand, knowledge transfer in R&D outsourcing is not always so critical, and for example in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries research contracts are extensively used, usually in the context of a long term relationship between firm and innovator. We analyze this kind of repeated interaction, and find that when the knowledge-transfer problem is not blocking, the firm should transfer to the innovator as much information as it is compatible with the latter's incentive constraints.

Legal Issues Relating to Free and Open Source Software - Fitzgerald, Brian (2003)
This is the publication that follows the 'Legal Issues Relating to Free and Open Source Software Conference' that was held in Brisbane, Australia on 3 July 2002. The conference examined legal and business issues facing the development and implementation of free and open source software. The presenters were lawyers, academics and software developers expert in the area drawn from Australia and the USA.

Licensing schemes in the production and distribution of Open Source software. An empirical investigation - Andrea Bonaccorsi (2003)
Contrary to what most people assume, Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. A software is considered Open Source if and only if its distribution terms [i.e. the license] comply with the set of criteria defined by the Open Source Definition (OSD). That is, to say that a code is Open Source is to say that it is subject to a member of a particular category of licenses (McGowan, 2000). As many others in the Open Source field, the research on Open Source licenses suffers from lack of empirical data. Although in the literature there are empirical studies that explore the relationships between license choice and project characteristics (Lerner and Tirole, 2002a), at present we are not aware of surveys that collect data on licensors, that is on firms producing and distributing software on an Open Source basis. This study addresses his shortcoming. We examine the license choice of the firms that supply Open Source products and services and relate it to their structural characteristics, business models and attitudes towards the movement and its community. Between September 2002 and March 2003 we conducted a survey on Italian firms that do business with Open Source software. We asked them to indicate the Open Source licenses with which they work, for the distribution of their software as well as the production process. We made reference to the distinction between copyleft and non-copyleft distribution schemes. Using these data, this paper aims at testing several theoretical hypotheses advanced by the literature on Open Source licenses. In order to make the discussion more lively, for each issue we present the hypothesis and our findings in sequence.

The Linux Managing Model - Federico Iannaci (2003)
This study focuses on the distinguishing traits of the Linux managing model. It introduces the concept of process to capture the idea of impermanence, dissolvability and change. Far from being a predictable flow of programming, assembling and releasing activities, it is suggested that the Linux development process displays a stream of activities that keep feeding back into each other, thus creating a complex and unpredictable outcome. The paper further introduces the concept of contingent response patterns to investigate the interaction flows occurring on the Linux mailing lists and subsume patch postings, bug reports and the associated reviewing and debugging activities under its umbrella. The enactment-selection-retention (ESR) model is subsequently brought forward to conceptualize this process as enactment of programming skills subject to selection activities conducted by Torvalds who retains the selected features and feeds them back to the developers? pool to undergo further enactment activities.

Maintainability of the Linux Kernel - Schach, Stephen R.; Jin, B.; Wright, D.R. (Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering ICSE2002, 2003)
We have examined 365 versions of Linux. For every version, we counted the number of instances of common (global) coupling between each of the 17 kernel modules and all the other modules in that version of Linux. We found that the number of instances of common coupling grows exponentially with version number. This result is significant at the 99.99% level, and no additional variables are needed to explain this increase. We conclude that, unless Linux is restructured with a bare minimum of common coupling, the dependencies induced by common coupling will, at some future date, make Linux exceedingly hard to maintain without inducing regression faults.
Keywords: coupling; kernel; linux; linux kernel; modules; source code

Managing the Boundary of an 'Open' Project - Siobhan O'Mahony (2003)
In the past ten years, the boundaries between public and open science and commercial research efforts have become more porous. Scholars have thus more critically examined ways in which these two institutional regimes intersect. Large open source software projects have also attracted commercial collaborators and now struggle to develop code in an open public environment that still protects their communal boundaries. This research applies a dynamic social network approach to understand how one community managed software project, Debian, develops a membership process. We examine the project's face-to-face social network during a five-year period (1997-2001) to see how changes in the social structure affect the evolution of membership mechanisms and the determination of gatekeepers. While the amount and importance of a contributor's work increases the probability that a contributor will become a gatekeeper, those more central in the social network are more likely to become gatekeepers and influence the membership process. A greater understanding of the mechanisms open projects use to manage their boundaries has critical implications for research and knowledge producing communities operating in pluralistic, open and distributed environments.
Keywords: debian; membership; social network analysis

Mining Open Source Software (OSS) Data Using Association Rules Network - Sanjay Chawla; Bavani Arunasalam; Joseph G. Davis (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003)
The Open Source Software(OSS) movement has attracted considerable attention in the last few years. In this paper we report our results of mining data acquired from SourceForge.net, the largest open source software hosting website. In the process we introduce Association Rules Network(ARN), a (hyper)graphical model to represent a special class of association rules. Using ARNs we discover important relationships between the attributes of successful OSS projects. We verify and validate these relationships using Factor Analysis, a classical statistical technique related to Singular Value Decomposition(SVD).
Keywords: arn; association rules; factor analysis; project success; sourceforge; svd

Modularity in Action: GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source Software Development Model Unleashed - Alessandro Narduzzo (2003)
Organizational and managerial theories of modularity applied to the design and production of complex artifacts are used to interpret the rise and success of Free/Open Source Software. Strengths and risks of the adoption of a modular approach in software project management are introduced and are related to the achievements of the GNU/Linux project. It is suggested that mindful implementation of the principles of modularity may improve the rate of success of many Free/Open Source software projects. Authors suggest a possible revision towards an improved theory of modularity that may be extended also to settings different from software production.

Motivation of Software Developers in Open Source Projects: An Internet-based Survey of Contributors to the Linux Kernel - Guido Hertel (RP Special Issue, 2003)
The motives of 141 contributors to a large Open Source Software project (the Linux kernel) was explored with an internet-based questionnaire study. Measured factors were both derived from discussions within the Linux community as well as from models from social sciences. Participants? engagement was particularly determined by their identification as a Linux developer, by pragmatic motives to improve own software, and by their tolerance of time investments. Moreover, some of the software development was accomplished by teams. Activities in these teams were particularly determined by participants? evaluation of the team goals as well as by their perceived indispensability and self-efficacy.

Neither market or hierarchy or network: The emerging bazaar governance - Benoit Demil (2003)
Despite the growing body of literature describing the open-source phenomenon, few contributions have been theoretically grounded and research has largely focused on the software industry. Drawing on transaction cost economics, we go beyond these limitations and advance that open source constitutes a new generic governance structure?which we label bazaar governance? based on a specific contract. We characterize this structure in terms of its strengths and weaknesses and in comparison with market, firm and network structures. We consider how bazaar governance is actualized within an industry and the institutional entrepreneur?s crucial role in this process. Finally, we propose that bazaar governance has a profound impact on the structure of the industry in which it is introduced.

Open Source as a Complex Adaptive System - Published in Emergence 5 (3) - Moreno Muffatto (2003)
The Open Source community and its activities can be considered to have the characteristics of a system. The Open Source system is distinctive because it is neither controlled by a central authority that defines strategy and organization nor totally chaotic. It can be placed at a middle position between a planned system and a chaotic one. In this sort of position there are non-formal rules which allow the system to produce significant results. The Complex Adaptive System theory can be used to better understand and analyze the Open Source system. This work presents a description of the main characteristics of the functioning of the Open Source community regarding its organizational structure and development process. The concept of complex adaptive system is then introduced and its functioning mechanisms briefly described. Finally, we will interpret the characteristics of the Open Source community in the context of complex adaptive systems theory.

Open Source as a Signalling Device - An Economic Analysis - Samuel Lee (2003)
Open source projects produce goods or standards that do not allow for the appropriation of private returns by those who contribute to these projects. In this paper we analyze why programmers will nevertheless invest their time and effort to code open source software. We argue that the particular way in which open source projects are managed and especially how contributions are attributed to individual agents, allows the best programmers to create a signal that more mediocre programmers cannot achieve. Through setting themselves apart they can turn this signal into monetary rewards that correspond to their superior capabilities. With this incentive they will forgo the immediate rewards they could earn in software companies producing proprietary software by restricting the access to the source code of their product. Whenever institutional arrangements are in place that enable the acquisition of such a signal and the subsequent substitution into monetary rewards, the contribution to open source projects and the resulting public good is a feasible outcome that can be explained by standard economic theory.

Open Source: Beyond the Fairytales - Richard P Gabriel (2003)
Open source is a software development model that to many is synonymous with a free and free-wheeling operating system juggernaut destined to upend current computer markets. IBM is embracing Linux to unify its hardware product line, and Microsoft is screaming that open source is anti-American and destructive of intellectual property. Analysts and executive have been gathering around open source to find out what it?s all about, and people like Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds once indistinguishable from society?s stereotype of the elfin programmers working in the dark on the software that powers the digital age have become heroes, spokesmen, and leaders in the new age of anti-monopolistic software. But is this narrow view adequate? Open source, for corporations, has more to do with a particular business strategy than it does with any specific technology. In fact, technology is just another piece of the puzzle for a successful technology company certainly it?s a necessary piece, but often it?s not the distinguishing piece.

Is Open Source Essentially an Agile Method? - Warsta, Juhani; Abrahamsson, Pekka (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Open Source Methodologies and Mission Critical Software Development - Voightman, M.P.; Coleman, C.P. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Open Source Software - An Economic Assessment - Nadine Kalwey (2003)
This study examines whether or not Open Source Software represents an economically suitable alternative to the proprietary commercial software market in terms of creating value-added and economic efficiency. Whereas no significant differences between both production processes are seen for customized software, the study comes to the conclusion that serious economic problems can occur in the field of packaged software. Starting from a discussion on how licenses like the GPL affect the ability to price software (which is usually below economic production costs), the impact of below cost pricing on the coordination capacity of software markets (customer sovereignty, resource allocation, income distribution, adaptability and innovation) and the sustainability of complementary strategies of Open Source business models (with and without cross subsidization of the non-market OSS-core) are described. Throughout the study, the role of the pricing system within a market economy is stressed considering the specific characteristics of software as an economic good. Aspects other than economic are not taken into account.

Open Source Software and the ``Private-Collective'' Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science - von Hippel, Eric; Georg von Krogh (Organization Science, 2003)

Open Source Software as an organisational Technology - Jonathan Barnes (2003)
This paper is still relatively preliminary, yet it provides a decent introduction to open source, as well as including discussion on various economic issues, contained in the following sections: The benefits of Open Source, Possible incentives that encourage contribution, Barriers to widespread implementation of Open Source.

Open Source Software can Improve the Health of the Bank Balance - The Beaumont Hospital Experience - Fitzgerald, Brian (2003)
This study describes the implementation of open source software in a large Irish public sector organization, Beaumont Hospital. The findings reveal a radical shift in open source deployment from invisible horizontal infrastructure systems to highly visible vertical applications. The case study describes the implementation of these systems, the difficulties encountered, and also the benefits in terms of astonishing cost savings of ?13m over 5 years. . Given that Beaumont were already receiving academic pricing discounts for many of their original proprietary closed source applications, the savings for a typical commercial organization could be even higher. The study also identifies the primary drivers in the move to OSS, namely principle, pragmatism and practicality. The study also indicates how a typical company can contribute back to the OSS community in their own unique way, by distributing applications form their own domain of expertise, rather than having to make detailed code contributions to the original code base.

Open Source Software Development - Robert Greenberg (2003)
This paper examines applies basic economic theory to Open Source Software Development. Through examination of rational actor behavior I show why economically motivated individuals and firms choose to develop code that to be given away freely. It also examines the various Open Source licenses, including the two most common, the Free Software Foundation?s General Public License (GPL) and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) License. Included are case studies to illustrate the workings of Open Source Software projects and how profit seeking firms have attached themselves to them. These case studies include the Apache Web Server, Mozilla, IBM, Microsoft?s Shared Source Initiative, and Red Hat. The associated business plans are also discussed. An executive summary precedes the paper and a glossary is attached to the end.

Open source software development and Lotka's Law: Bibliometric patterns in programming - Newby, G. B.; Greenberg, J.; Jones, P. (Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2003)
This research applies Lotka's Law to metadata on open source software development. Lotka's Law predicts the proportion of authors at different levels of productivity. Open source software development harnesses the creativity of thousands of programmers worldwide, is important to the progress of the Internet and many other computing environments, and yet has not been widely researched. We examine metadata from the Linux Software Map (LSM), which documents many open source projects, and Sourceforge, one of the largest resources for open source developers. Authoring patterns found are comparable to prior studies of Lotka's Law for scientific and scholarly publishing. Lotka's Law was found to be effective in understanding software development productivity patterns, and offer promise in predicting aggregate behavior of open source developers.
Keywords: developers; linux; linux software map; lsm; sourceforge; team size

Open Source Software Development: Some Historical Perspectives - Alessandro Nuvolari (2003)
In this paper we suggest that historical studies of technology can help us to account for some, perplexing (at least for traditional economic reasoning) features of open source software development. When looked in historical perspective, open source software seems to be a particular case of what Robert Allen has termed "collective invention". We explore the interpretive value of this historical parallel in detail, comparing open source software with two remarkable episodes of nineteenth century technical advances.

Open source software in the trenches: Lessons from a large-scale OSS implementation - Fitzgerald, Brian; Kenny, Tony (International Conference on Information Systems, 2003)
Keywords: open source

Open Source vs Closed Source Software: Public Policies in the Software Market - Stefano Comino (2003)
This paper analyses the impact of public policies supporting open source software (OSS). Users can be divided between those who know about the existence of OSS, the informed adopters, and the uninformed ones; the presence of uniformed users yields to market failures that justify government intervention. We study three policies: i) mandatory adoption, when government forces public agencies, schools and universities to adopt OSS, ii) information campaign, when the government informs the uninformed users about the existence and the characteristics of OSS and, iii) subsidisation, when consumers are payed a subsidy when adopting OSS. We show that the second policy enhances welfare, the third is always welfare decreasing while mandatory adoption can be either good or bad for society depending on the number of informed and uninformed adopters.

Open-Source Development Processes and Tools - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Lavery, J.; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Organizational learning in open-source software projects: an analysis of debugging data - Huntley, C.L. (IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2003)
This paper studies organizational learning effects in open-source programming projects. Working with data from the Apache and Mozilla projects, the study focuses on three aspects of open-source development. The first is the use of the open-source approach as a hedge against system complexity. The second is the adaptive learning mechanisms realized by the debugging process. The last is the learning curve effects of project-specific experience on bug cycle times. The results indicate that while open-source development is subject to positive learning effects, these effects are not universal, with some projects deriving more benefit than others.
Keywords: apache; bugs; complexity; mozilla

Organizational Structure of Open Source Projects: A Life Cycle Approach - Donald E. Wynn (Proceedings of 7th Annual Conference of the Southern Association for Information Systems, 2003)
The structure of open source project communities is discussed in relation to the organizational life cycle. In lieu of sales figures, the download counts for each project are used to identify the life cycle stage of a random sample of open source projects. A research model is proposed that attempts to measure the fit between the life cycle stage and the specific organizational characteristics of these projects (focus, division of labor, role of the leader, level of commitment, and coordination/control) as an indicator of the success of a project as measured by the satisfaction and involvement of both developers and users.
Keywords: division of labor; downloads; growth; interview; leadership; life cycle; lifecycle; project success; roles; sourceforge; Survey

Participatory Usability: supporting proactive users - David M Nichols; Dana McKay; Michael B Twidale (Proceedings of the 4th Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction - New Zealand Chapter (CHINZ'03), 2003)
After software has been released the opportunities for users to influence development can often be limited. In this paper we review the research on post-deployment usability and make explicit its connections to open source software development. We describe issues involved in the design of end-user reporting tools with reference to the Safari web browser and a digital library prototype.

Puzzling with a top-down Blueprint and a bottom-up Network: An explorative analysis of the Open Source World using ITIL and Social Network Analysis - Sanne Te Meerman (2003)
This paper explains some of the necessary tasks that need to be performed for the construction and maintenance of software. These necessary activities are abstracted from ITIL, a best- practice 'blueprint', that is often used by IT companies to structure their processes. Next, using Social Network Analysis, an investigation is conducted to asses how the activities that ITIL describes are performed in the open source 'network'.

Quality and the Reliance on Individuals in Free Software Projects - Martin Michlmayr; Hill, B.M. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Quality Impacts of Clandestine Common Coupling - Jin Schach (2003)
The number of instances of common coupling between a module M and the other modules can be changed without any explicit change to M; this is termed "clandestine common coupling." This paper presents results from a study of clandestine common coupling in 391 versions of Linux. Specifically, the common coupling between each of 5332 kernel modules and the rest of the product as a whole was measured. In more than half of the new versions, a change in common coupling was observed, even though none of the modules themselves was changed.

Release Management Within Open Source Projects - Erenkrantz, J. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Re-working by the Linux Kernel developers - Matt Ratto (2003)
Technology design is generally a matter of re-working existing systems rather than the designing of entirely novel artifacts. In this paper I explore part of a computer operating system called Linux that is designed to be re-worked by its users, a process I call 'designing for redesign'. I examine the practices of reworking within this development effort using some concepts gleaned from activity theory, a meta-theoretical model that particularly focuses on the simultaneously material and conceptual aspects of artifacts. This work is two-fold; first to examine design as part of a larger activity of re-working, and second, to begin to put together a model of socio-technical activity that incorporates the complex epistemological and ontological conditions that characterize current human conditions. Understanding the sociality and materiality of "knowing" and "doing" in technologized society means unpacking what we mean when we talk of 'access' and understanding 'use' as often an activity of re-working.

Satisfying heterogeneous user needs via innovation toolkits: the case of Apache security software - Nik Franke; von Hippel, Eric (Research Policy, 2003)
Manufacturers customarily provide only a few product variants to address the average needs of users in the major segments of markets they serve. When user needs are highly heterogeneous, this approach leaves many seriously dissatisfied. One solution is to enable users to modify products on their own using "innovation toolkits." We explore the effectiveness of this solution in an empirical study of Apache security software. We find high heterogeneity of need in that field, and also find that users modifying their own software to be significantly more satisfied than non-innovating users. We propose that the "user toolkits" solution will be useful in many markets characterized by heterogeneous demand. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Simulating an Automated Approach to Discovery and Modeling of Open Source Software Development Processes - Chris Jensen (2003)
This paper describes a new approach to process discovery that examines the Internet information spaces of open source software development projects. Such knowledge can then be employed to determine the requirements and design of automated process discovery and modeling mechanisms that can be applied to Web-based open source software development projects.

Socialization in Open Technical Communities - Joseph Reagle (2003)
While many definitions of openness focus on the character and licenses of the software products, relatively few directly address the character of the social organization that develops those products. This essay offers a definition of openness and considers how that characteristic affects the recruitment and socialization of newcomers to such organizations. The relevance of socialization is clear when one consider the growth of on-line communities, and precariousness of membership in voluntary organizations. I then suggest that "forking," a split of the communities, is integral to the definition of openness and a possible vector of communicating social norms between communities, and that a significant difference between open technical communities and some other open/voluntary communities is the internal orientation of status seeking within the community.

Software security for open-source systems - Cowan, C. (IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, 2003)
Debate over whether open-source software development leads to more or less secure software has raged for years. Neither is intrinsically correct: open-source software gives both attackers and defenders greater power over system security. Fortunately, several security-enhancing technologies for open-source systems can help defenders improve their security.
Keywords: security

Studying the evolution of libre software projects using publicly available data - Gregorio Robles; Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona; Jose Centeno-González; Vicente Matellan-Olivera; Luis Rodero-Merino (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Supporting Distributed and Decentralized Projects: Drawing Lessons from the Open Source Community - Erenkrantz, J.; Taylor, R.N. (1st Workshop on Open Source in an Industrial Context, 2003)
Open source projects are typically organized in a distributed and decentralized manner. These factors strongly determine the processes followed and constrain the types of tools that can be utilized. This paper explores how distribution and decentralization have affected processes and tools in existing open source projects with the goals of summarizing the lessons learned and identifying opportunities for improving both. Issues considered include decision-making, accountability, communication, awareness, rationale, managing source code, testing, and release management.
Keywords: abiword; apache; debian; freebsd; kde; linux; mozilla; mysql; perl; PHP; postgresql; python; subversion; tomcat; tools

Survival of open-source projects: A population ecology perspective - Chengalur-Smith, Shobha; Sidorova, Anna (International Conference on Information Systems 2003, 2003)
Keywords: open source

Tools for light-weight knowledge sharing in open-source software development - Cubranic, Davor; Holmes, Reid; Ying, Annie; Murphy, Gail C. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Toward an Empirical Assessment of the Benefits of Open Source Software - Russo, Barbara; Zuliani, P.; Succi, G. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Toward an understanding of the motivation Open Source Software developers - Ye, Yunwen; Kishida, Kouichi (Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2003)
An Open Source Software (OSS) project is unlikely to be successful unless there is an accompanied community that provides the platform for developers and users to collaborate. Members of such communities are volunteers whose motivation to participate and contribute is of essential importance to the success of OSS projects. In this paper, we aim to create an understanding of what motivates people to participate in OSS communities. We theorize that learning is one of the motivational forces. Our theory is grounded in the learning theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation, and is supported by analyzing the social structure of OSS communities and the co-evolution between OSS systems and communities. We also discuss practical implications of our theory for creating and maintaining sustainable OSS communities as well as for software engineering research and education.
Keywords: change log; COMMUNITY; contributions; contributors; developers; email; email archives; evolution; gimp; log files; mailing list; roles; source code

Towards a Product Model of Open Source Software in a Commercial Environment - Deng, J.; Seifert, T.; Vogel, S. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Trust, control and the role of interorganizational systems in electronic partnerships - Gallivan, M. J.; Depledge, G. (Information Systems Journal, 2003)
To survive and thrive in today's competitive marketplace, organizations are increasingly migrating to new organizational structures in which partnerships and interorganizational systems (IOSs) are becoming more important. The success of these partnerships depends on both trust and control - complex constructs that act on and shape each other over time. Many organizations assume that high levels of trust are necessary for net-enabled electronic partnerships. We examine this assumption from two perspectives: the initial decision to enter into a partnership or alliance, and its ongoing operation. Our findings suggest that researchers have treated trust simplistically, failing to distinguish the need for trust (which is inversely related to the organization's ability to control its partners) and the level of trust (which is an actual quantity that may change during the lifetime of the partnership). In many organizations, there is a gap between these two trust dimensions, which management attempts to close by changing the level of control. In this process, the IOS is key. To understand the relationship of IOS use to trust and control, we applied structured content analysis and analytic induction to 16 published case studies and used the results to create a framework for relating trust and control. At the heart of the framework is the recognition that trust and control are not simple substitutes for each other. Rather, they form a dialectic, where it makes sense to consider each construct only in relationship to the other. Using the framework, we identify areas for follow-up research and suggestions for practitioners.

Understanding Free/Open Source Software Evolution: Applying, Breaking and Rethinking the Laws of Software Evolution - Walt Scacchi (2003)
This study examines whether the evolution of open source software conforms to the laws of software evolution that have been in development for more than 30 years. Given evidence and data that may not conform, it becomes necessary to consider how the laws and theory might be revamped to better account for the data that characterizes both conventional closed source software and F/OSS system evolution.

Understanding the Nature of Participation & Coordination in Open and Gated Source Software Development Communities - Sonali Shah (2003)
This paper explores the motivations of participants from two software development communities and finds that most participants are motivated by either a need to use the software or an enjoyment of programming. The latter group, hobbyists or enthusiasts, are critical to the long-term viability and sustainability of open source software code: they take on tasks that might otherwise go undone, are largely need-neutral as they make decisions, and express a desire to maintain the simplicity, elegance, and modularity of the code. The motives of hobbyist evolve over time; most join the community because they have a need for the software and stay because they enjoy programming in the context of a particular community. Governance and licensing structures affect this evolution.

The Usability of Open Source Software - David M Nichols; Michael B Twidale (First Monday, 2003)
Open source communities have successfully developed a great deal of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability.

The user-developer communication process: a critical case study - Gallivan, M. J.; Keil, M. (Information Systems Journal, 2003)
Although user participation in systems development is widely believed to have positive impacts on user acceptance, it does not guarantee success and there is still much that we do not know about how and why user participation sometimes delivers positive benefits, but not always. Much of the prior research on user participation assumes that user-developer communication will ensure that the resulting system will be designed to meet users' needs and will be accepted by them. The nature and quality of the communication between users and developers, however, remains an understudied aspect of user participation. In this paper, we focus on the user-developer communication process. We propose a process model that delineates four stages of communication between users and software developers, and we argue that these stages must occur for user participation to lead to effective outcomes. To illustrate our model, we apply it to analyse a 'critical case study' of a software project that failed despite high levels of user involvement. We show that when 'communication lapses' occurred in several of the user-developer communication stages, developers failed to be informed regarding the underlying reasons that users avoided the system. Based on the insights from this case study, we advise researchers and practitioners how to leverage the potential benefits of user participation, rather than take them for granted.

Version Management Tools: CVS to BK in the Linux Kernel - Maha Shaikh (2003)
Version management tools might be seen as a prerequisite for open source development today as projects become too large to be managed by maintainers alone. Yet the OS process depends on fluid coordination and collaboration, with the underlying qualities of this process based on firm trust and respect for fellow developers. This paper is a study of how debate over version tools reflects governance and decision making in an OS community. The paper is based on a study of the Linux kernel community as it first saw a partial acceptance of the CVS tool, and then later adopted BK. The paper explains the adoption processes in relation to governance concerns, licence issue, and questions of technical performance.

Version Management Tools: CVS to BK in the Linux Kernel - Shaikh, M.; Cornford, T. (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

The Virtual Organizational Culture of a Free Software Development Community - Margret Elliott (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Why open source software can succeed - Andrea Bonaccorsi (RP Special Issue, 2003)
The paper discusses three key economic problems raised by the emergence and diffusion of open source software: motivation, coordination, and diffusion under a dominant standard. First the movement took off through the activity of a software development community that deliberately did not follow profit motivations. Second, a hierarchical coordination emerged without the support of an organization with proprietary rights. Third, Linux and other open source systems diffused in an evnvironment dominated by established proprietary standards, which benefited from significant increasing returns. The paper show that recent developments in the theory of critical mass in the diffusion of technologies with network externality may help to explain these phenomena.

Why OSS Folks Think SE Folks Are Clue-Impaired - Bart Massey (Proceedings of the 3rd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2003)

Adopting OSS Methods by Adopting OSS Tools - Robbins, Jason E. (Proceedings of the 2nd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2002)
The open source movement has created and used a set of software engineering tools with features that fit the characteristics of open source development processes. To a large extent, the open source culture and methodology are conveyed to new developers via the toolset itself, and through the demonstrated usage of these tools on existing projects. The rapid and wide adoption of open source tools stands in stark contrast to the difficulties encountered in adopting traditional CASE tools. This paper explores the characteristics that make these tools adoptable and how adopting them may influence software development processes.
Keywords: ant; argouml; bugzilla; cactus; cvs; developers; eclipse; emacs; email; faq; junit; mailing lists; make; netbeans; package management; rpm; scarab; subversion; teams; tools; torque; WORK

Analyzing cloning evolution in the Linux kernel - Antoniol, G.; Villano, U.; Merlo, E.; Di Penta, M. (Information and Software Technology, 2002)
Identifying code duplication in large multi-platform software systems is a challenging problem. This is due to a variety of reasons including the presence of high-level programming languages and structures interleaved with hardware-dependent low-level resources and assembler code, the use of GUI-based configuration scripts generating commands to compile the system, and the extremely high number of possible different configurations. This paper studies the extent and the evolution of code duplications in the Linux kernel. Linux is a large, multi-platform software system; it is based on the Open Source concept, and so there are no obstacles in discussing its implementation. In addition, it is decidedly too large to be examined manually: the current Linux kernel release (2.4.18) is about three million LOCs. Nineteen releases, from 2.4.0 to 2.4.18, were processed and analyzed, identifying code duplication among Linux subsystems by means of a metric-based approach. The obtained results support the hypothesis that the Linux system does not contain a relevant fraction of code duplication. Furthermore, code duplication tends to remain stable across releases, thus suggesting a fairly stable structure, evolving smoothly without any evidence of degradation. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: cvs; kernel; lines of code; linux; loc; project success; source code

Cave or Community? An Empirical Examination of 100 Mature Open Source Projects - Sandeep Krishnamurthy (First Monday, 2002)
Starting with Eric Raymond's groundbreaking work, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work produced by a community of developers. Yet, given the nature of software programs, one also hears of developers with no lives that work very hard to achieve great product results. In this paper, I sought empirical evidence that would help us understand which is more common - the cave (i.e., lone producer) or the community. Based on a study of the top 100 mature products on Sourceforge, I find a few surprising things. First, most OSS programs are developed by individuals, rather than communities. The median number of developers in the 100 projects I looked at was 4 and the mode was 1 - numbers much lower than previous numbers reported for highly successful projects! Second, most OSS programs do not generate a lot of discussion. Third, products with more developers tend to be viewed and downloaded more often. Fourth, the number of developers associated with a project was positively correlated to the age of the project. Fifth, the larger the project, the smaller the percent of project administrators.
Keywords: age; contributors; developers; project success; registration; sourceforge

Characteristics and Applicability of Open Source-Based Product Development Model in Other than Software Industries - Franciszek Siedlok (2002)
The main objective of this research is to examine the Open Source product development paradigm and its applicability to other than software industries. First part of this paper examines the NPD process, its evolution and main characteristics during years. Than approaches to product development adopted in Open Source projects are presented, with emphasis on the managerial and knowledge related issues, as those are focal to NPD. In the second part Open Source-based Product Development Model is being constructed and its applicability to other than open source software industry verified.

Characterizing the OSS process - Capiluppi, Andrea; Patricia Lago; Maurizio Morisio (Proceedings of the 2nd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2002)
The Open Source model of software development has gained the attention of both the business, the practitioners’ and the research communities. The Open Source process has been described by the seminal paper by Eric Raymond [4] and [5]. However, sound empirical studies are still very limited [3], [6]. Our goal is to investigate the OS process by empirical means, to analyze, characterize it, and possibly model it with quantitative models. It should be noted that the Open Source process provides open process and product data, and therefore is a rare opportunity for empirical research. Our initial research focus is on the characterization of the process, starting from the evolution of OS projects. In traditional projects, a significant number of releases in a short time is usually considered an instability factor [7] and [8], while in the OSS community, it is an evidence of vitality, shows the commitment of the authors and the power of attraction of other programmers [9]. Is it possible to characterize the vitality of projects? And, can vitality be traced to some other characteristics of a project?
Keywords: bugs; change log; classification; cvs; downloads; freshmeat; metadata; patches; popularity; project success; release history; sourceforge; vitality

Coase's penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm - Benkler, Y. (Yale Law Journal, 2002)
For decades our common understanding of the organization of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. This dichotomy was first identified in the early work of Ronald Coase and was developed most explicitly in the work of institutional economist Oliver Williamson. Recently, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year-old phenomenon called free software or open source software. This phenomenon involves thousands, or even tens of thousands, of computer programmers who collaborate on large- and small-scale projects without traditional firm-based or market-based ownership of the resulting product. This Article explains why free software is only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon emerging in the digitally networked. environment, a third mode of production that the author calls "commons-based peer production." The Article begins by demonstrating the widespread use of commons-based peer production on the Internet through a number of detailed examples, such as Wikipedia, Slashdot the Open Directory Project, and Google. The Article uses these examples to reveal fundamental characteristics of commons-based peer production that distinguish it from the property- and contract-based modes of firms and markets. The central distinguishing characteristic. is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals rather than market prices or managerial commands. The Article then explains why this mode has systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies in the digitally networked environment when the object of production is information or culture. First, peer production has an advantage in what the author calls "information opportunity cost," because it loses less information about who might be the best person for a given job. Second, there are substantial increasing allocation gains to be captured from allowing large clusters of potential contributors to interact with large clusters of information resources in search of new projects and opportunities for collaboration. The Article concludes with an overview of how these models use a variety of technological, social, and formal strategies to overcome the collective action problems usually solved in managerial and market-based systems by property, contract, and managerial commands.

Code quality analysis in open source software development - Ioannis Stamelos; Lefteris Angelis; Apostolos Oikonomou; Georgios L. Bleris (Information Systems Journal, 2002)
Proponents of open source style software development claim that better software is produced using this model compared with the traditional closed model. However, there is little empirical evidence in support of these claims. In this paper, we present the results of a pilot case study aiming: (a) to understand the implications of structural quality; and (b) to figure out the benefits of structural quality analysis of the code delivered by open source style development. To this end, we have measured quality characteristics of 100 applications written for Linux, using a software measurement tool, and compared the results with the industrial standard that is proposed by the tool. Another target of this case study was to investigate the issue of modularity in open source as this characteristic is being considered crucial by the proponents of open source for this type of software development. We have empirically assessed the relationship between the size of the application components and the delivered quality measured through user satisfaction. We have determined that, up to a certain extent, the average component size of an application is negatively related to the user satisfaction for this application.
Keywords: C; Code quality characteristics; functions; linux; metrics; open source development; software measurement; structural code analysis; Suse; user satisfaction

The Coming Software Revolution - Rosenberg, D.K. (Proceedings of the 2nd ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2002)
The growing adoption of collaborative software development will change the global software industry by altering its economics of scale, location, and price. The growth of non-proprietary code will depress prices in the proprietary sector, and the possession of source code will enable the growth of more software industrial centers around the world; their emergence will threaten the business of current leaders. National governments which see themselves as disadvantaged or even threatened by the current software powers will encourage collaborative software development and the services that this development model drives. Only world-wide draconic legislation by the current software powers has any hope of preserving the status quo.
Keywords: ECONOMICS; management; open source; politics

Community Effort in Online Groups? Who Does the Work and Why? - Brian Butler (2002)
In this paper, the authors consider how the formal leadership role, personal and community benefits, and community characteristics influence the effort members put into helping their online groups. Results from a survey of Internet listserv owners and other members suggest that though owners, who have a formal leadership role, do more of the effortful community building work than do regular members, other members also take on some of the work. Moreover, members who value different benefits are likely to contribute to the development on an online community in different ways.

Competing on Open Source: Strategies and Practise - T.R. Madanmohan (2002)
This paper seeks to address the following issues: How do firms compete with open source? What resources become critical in managing their growth? What strategies do they adopt to co-exist with dominant proprietary software firms? How do they interface with communities of practice to exploit network externalities? What strategies do they adopt to lock-in developers? Based on a multiple case analysis the authors seek to draw initial conclusions about the key strategic aspects that underlie the open source initiatives. Finally they describe how for-profit firms can establish and sustain open source practice.

A contribution to the understanding of illegal copying of software: empirical and analytical evidence against conventional wisdom - Carlos Osorio-Urzua (2002)
The paper analyzes different variables that affect the dynamics among copyrights, illegal copying and software market creation. There is empirical and analytical evidence supporting three major findings. First, proprietary source companies use illegal copying as a source of market creation in the early stages of development of the market. Second, this strategy has positive effects in the software market in the long-term. Third, in presence of an Open Source alternative, proprietary source companies need to use their illegal user base in order to compete better and this strategy becomes optimal.