Carrot2 Clustering Framework - Weiss, Dawid; Osi´nski, Stanisław (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Carrot2 is an Open Source framework for research experiments with querying various textual data sources, processing and presentation of the results. Its main goal is to promote component reuse in order to reduce the effort involved in the development of Information Retrieval software. So far, the most successful and popular application of Carrot2 has been organizing results of Internet searches into easy to browse thematic groups called clusters. In this area, the project successfully competes with commercial counterparts like Vivisimo or iBoogie.
Keywords: BSD license; cluster; clustering framework; open source; research; result

The challenges of creating open source education software: the Gild experience - Daniel M. German; Rigby, Peter; Cubranic, Davor; Storey, Margaret-Anne; Thomson, Suzanne (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Keywords: COMMUNITY; eclipse; learning environment; novice programmers; open source; programming environment

A Cluster Analysis of Open Source Licenses (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Licenses of open source software (OSS) are quiet various but is said to be categorised into three. That is GPL (GNU general Public License) like, LGPL (GNU Lesser general Public License) like, or MPL (Mozilla Public License) like. We check this classification by using our new framework and cluster analysis. And we find another three categories for OSS Licenses.

Collaboration Using OSSmole: A repository of FLOSS data and analyses - Conklin, Megan; James Howison; Kevin Crowston (Symposium on Mining Software Repositories, 2005)

Communication, coordination and control in distributed development: an OSS case study - Persson, Anna; Lings, Brian; Lundell, Björn; Mattsson, Anders; Ärlig, Ulf (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
It has been claimed that distributed development practices in OSS development may be a model for enterprise development practices of the future. With this in mind, we have conducted a study of one OSS project, namely ArgoUML, with a view to understanding development practice within the project, and specifically to considering possible differences from traditional (non-OSS) distributed development conducted in a commercial project. We do this by explicitly considering issues of communication, coordination and control. Our findings suggest that primary differences lie in control and resulting project structures, motivated through differing goals. We comment on the open question of how the advantages of one development context can be realised in the other.

Communication from scratch: towards accessible open source information systems - Crombie, David; Lenoir, Roger; McKenzie, Neil (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper is intended to provide an overview of a unifying and inclusive approach to open source information systems. In this respect the paper matches the fundamental aims of the Open Source Systems (2005) Conference. This approach can be characterised as communication from scratch. Firstly, we will provide an explanation of our approach to inclusive design and consider emerging perspectives on the nature of accessibility in the wider sense. Secondly, we will introduce the concept of communication from scratch and provide an explanation of the benefits of a convergent gradualism. Thirdly we will explain how these ideas have helped to shape our understanding of open source information processing, a concept which encompasses several of the conference themes and provides a unifying interface to our earlier work on accessible system design. Lastly, we will provide some concrete examples of the communication from scratch approach (crossing several domains) and introduce, ...

Comparing High-Change Modules and Modules with the Highest Measurement Values in Two Large-Scale Open-Source Products - Günes Koru, A.; Tian, Jeff (Jianhui) (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2005)
Identifying change-prone modules can enable software developers to take focused preventive actions that can reduce maintenance costs and improve quality. Some researchers observed a correlation between change proneness and structural measures, such as size, coupling, cohesion, and inheritance measures. However, the modules with the highest measurement values were not found to be the most troublesome modules by some of our colleagues in industry, which was confirmed by our previous study of six large-scale industrial products. To obtain additional evidence, we identified and compared high-change modules and modules with the highest measurement values in two large-scale open-source products, Mozilla and OpenOffice, and we characterized the relationship between them. Contrary to common intuition, we found through formal hypothesis testing that the top modules in change-count rankings and the modules with the highest measurement values were different. In addition, we observed that high-change modules had fairly high places in measurement rankings, but not the highest places. The accumulated findings from these two open-source products, together with our previous similar findings for six closed-source products, should provide practitioners with additional guidance in identifying the change-prone modules.
Keywords: mozilla; openoffice

Competition between Open Source and Proprietary Software, and the Scope for Public Policy - Gutsche, Joerg (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Open source software (OSS) has become a remarkable competitor of traditional, proprietary software in many markets. This has led advocates of OSS to demand public policy interventions in favor of OSS. The main argument is that OSS mitigates market failures associated with typical features of software markets: economies of scale, direct network effects, switching costs, and systems competition. We study the impact of several policy instruments on social welfare in a duopoly model which incorporates all of the aforementioned features of software markets. Overall, we do not find much support for interventions in favor of OSS. However, systems competition may lead to a situation in which the subsidization of OSS complements increases welfare.

A Conceptual Model for Enterprise Adoption of Open Source Software - Kwan, Stephen K.; Joel West (The Standards Edge: Open Season, 2005)

Coordination of Free/Libre Open Source Software development - Kevin Crowston; Kangning Wei; Li, Qing; Eseryel, U. Yeliz; Howison, James (International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS 2005), 2005)
The apparent success of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development projects such as Linux, Apache, and many others has raised the question, what lessons from FLOSS development can be transferred to mainstream software development? In this paper, we use coordination theory to analyze coordination mechanisms in FLOSS development and compare our analysis with existing literature on coordination in proprietary software development. We examined developer interaction data from three active and successful FLOSS projects and used content analysis to identify the coordination mechanisms used by the participants. We found that there were similarities between the FLOSS groups and the reported practices of the proprietary project in the coordination mechanisms used to manage task-task dependencies. However, we found clear differences in the coordination mechanisms used to manage task-actor dependencies. While published descriptions of proprietary software development involved an elaborate system to locate the developer who owned the relevant piece of code, we found that “self-assignment” was the most common mechanism across three FLOSS projects. This coordination mechanism is consistent with expectations for distributed and largely volunteer teams. We conclude by discussing whether these emergent practices can be usefully transferred to mainstream practice and indicating directions for future research.
Keywords: case study; compiere; coordination; egroupware; email; email archives; FLOSS; gaim; mailing list

Coordination Processes in Open Source Software Development: The Linux Case Study - Federico Iannaci (2005)
Although open source projects have been subject to extensive study, their coordination processes are still poorly understood. Drawing on organization theory, this paper sets out to remedy this imbalance by showing that large-scale open source projects exhibit three main coordination mechanisms, namely standardization, loose coupling and partisan mutual adjustment. Implications in terms of electronically-mediated communications and networked interdependencies are discussed in the final sections where a new light is cast on the concept of structuring as a by-product of localized adjustments.

Criteria for the non invasive transition to OpenOffice - Rossi, Bruno; Scotto, Marco; Sillitti, Alberto; Succi, Giancarlo (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Open Source Software (OSS) is receiving an increasing attention as a possible alternative to proprietary solutions. There are supporters of both the alternatives that stress advantages and disadvantages, but what is missing is an empirical view of a transition with the aid of case studies and controlled experiments. The aim of the paper is to report the results of an empirical investigation in the field of office automation in the Public Administration (PA). The available OSS in the field is introduced in the existing environment while preserving the proprietary solution. The analysis is supported by both qualitative and quantitative data. The effects on productivity and on users' attitude towards OSS and the emerging criteria for a possible transition are exposed.

Defining a Distributed Agile Methodology for an Open Source Scenario - Angioni, Manuela; Sanna, Raffaella; Soro, Alessandro (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
In this paper we propose and describe an agile methodology for distributed development (MADD - Methodology for Agile Distributed Development). In particular, it’s illustrated a set of best practices to apply in a distributed and agile context, chosen on the base of their impact software quality and team interoperation. Beyond the proposed methodology, we show the results of a survey that we submitted to various contributors of Open Source projects. The survey has been of support to the definition of the MADD, helping to more understand and estimate if, how and how much agile practices and values are already present in the OS world, that today represents one of the most emblematic examples of distributed development. The MADD methodology will be adopted on a software development project at the University of Cagliari (Italy), by a group of students that will work like an Open Source community.

Defining the Total Cost of Ownership for the Transition to Open Source Systems - Russo, Barbara; Braghin, Chiara; Gasperi, Paolo; Sillitti, Alberto; Succi, Giancarlo (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper provides a a framework to evaluate the transition to a OSS software solution in terms of returns and losses in the context of Public Administrations. The ultimate goal of the framework is to identify costs that are not easy to trace or that are not usually collected like user acceptance. The framework has been conducted using a Total Cost of Ownership approach, which is the most frequently used model to conduct cost comparisons between two or more IT systems. The study further implements the Goal Question Metric paradigm to identify the cost metrics. The framework relies various methods to collect the data, including questionnaires with end-users, qualitative interviews with IT-managers and company balance sheets. An example of framework's use is provided.

Democratizing Innovation - von Hippel, Eric (MIT Press, 2005)
Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users–both individuals and firms–often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging user-centered innovation system. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all. The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products–most notably in the free and open-source software movement–but also in physical products. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive. Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and systematically seek out innovations developed by users. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.

Developer identification methods for integrated data from various sources - Gregorio Robles; Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona (Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2005)
Studying a software project by mining data from a single repository has been a very active research field in software engineering during the last years. However, few efforts have been devoted to perform studies by integrating data from various repositories, with different kinds of information, which would, for instance, track the different activities of developers. One of the main problems of these multi-repository studies is the different identities that developers use when they interact with different tools in different contexts. This makes them appear as different entities when data is mined from different repositories (and in some cases, even from a single one). In this paper we propose an approach, based on the application of heuristics, to identify the many identities of developers in such cases, and a data structure for allowing both the anonymized distribution of information, and the tracking of identities for verification purposes. The methodology will be presented in general, and applied to the GNOME project as a case example. Privacy issues and partial merging with new data sources will also be considered and discussed.
Keywords: anonymization; bug tracker; developers; email; email address; gnome; identity; mailing list; privacy; source code; version control

Development Success in Open Source Software Projects: Exploring the Impact of Copylefted Licenses - Colazo, Jorge A.; Fang, Yulin; Neufeld, Derrick J. (Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2005), 2005)
Copyleft prevents the source code of open source software (OSS) from being privately appropriated. The ethos of the OSS movement suggests that volunteer developers may particularly value and contribute to copylefted projects. Based on social movement theory, we hypothesized that copylefted OSS projects are more likely than non-copylefted OSS projects to succeed in the development process, in terms of two key indicators: developer membership and developer productivity. We performed an exploratory study using data from 62 relevant OSS projects spanning an average of three years of development time. We found that copylefted projects were associated with higher developer membership and productivity. This is the first study to empirically test the relationship between copylefted licenses and OSS project success. Implications for OSS project initiators as well as future research directions are discussed.
Keywords: contributions; copyleft; developer; developers; membership; productivity; project success; success

Development-oriented Open Source eLearning Tool Evaluation: the Edukalibre Approach - Botturi, Luca; Chris Tebb; Vania Dimitrova; Drew Withworth; Julika Matravers; Jutta Geldermann; Isabelle Hubert (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)

Digesting Virtual “Geek” Culture: The Summarization of Technical Internet Relay Chats - Liang Zhou; Edouard Hovy (Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the ACL, 2005)
This paper describes a summarization system for technical chats and emails on the Linux kernel. To reflect the complexity and sophistication of the discussions, they are clustered according to subtopic structure on the sub-message level, and immediate responding pairs are identified through machine learning methods. A resulting summary consists of one or more mini-summaries, each on a subtopic from the discussion.
Keywords: computational linguistics; irc; linux; summarizing

Distributed Software Platforms for Rehabilitating Obsolete Hardware - Russo, Ruggero; Lamanna, Davide; Baldoni, Roberto (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The diffusion of ICTs created the issue of a huge quantity of old computers to be discarded (E-waste). Sustainable dismantle is becoming a global enviromental emergency. Trashware movement is spreading worldwide, aiming to profitably reuse discarded computers as an alternative to dismantling them. Trashware is deeply related to the Open Source and Free Software movements. The aim of this piece of research is to combine Trashware to clustering, in order to verify if further optimisations are possible. Experiments were conducted on clusters of old machines and results are hereby presented.

Doctoral Symposium at OSS 2005 - Russo, Barbara (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)

An Economic Model of User Rating in an Online Recommender System - F.M. Harper; X. Li; Y. Chen; Konstan, J.A. (10th International Conference on User Modeling, 2005)

Economics approaching OSS: reviewing 15 years of debate - De Prato, Giuditta (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The work aims at reviewing the theoretical literature on the development and diffusion of Open Source Software (OSS) relevant to an economic approach. It provides a synthetic picture of the areas of economic analysis for OSS, by attempting to frame relevant research efforts into a taxonomy based on attributes of innovation and process of diffusion. The main contributions investigating in the past decade the economic theoretical models beyond the “open” way of producing and distributing software goods analyse: i) its supposed nature of complex public good, ii) the production process and distributed work organisation, iii) the evaluation of its impact on the software market, both at market level and at firm level. The relationship of the open source model with knowledge appropriation and reuse, and with innovation diffusion to support economic growth and social wealth would help drawing related economics and policy issues.

EDOS: Environment for the Development and Distribution of Open Source Software - Abiteboul, Serge; Leroy, Xavier; Vrdoljak, Boris; Di Cosmo, Roberto; Fermigier, Stéfane; Laurière, Stéphane; Lepied, Frédéric; Pop, Radu; Villard, Florent; Smets, Jean-Paul; Bryce, Ciarán; Dittrich, Klaus R.; et al. (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The open-source software community is now comprised of a very large and growing number of contributors and users. The GNU/Linux operating system for instance has an estimated 18 million users worldwide and its contributing developers can be counted by thousands. The critical mass of contributors taking part in various opensource projects has helped to ensure high quality for open source software. However, despite the achievements of the open-source software industry, there are issues in the production of large scale open-source software (OSS) such as the GNU/Linux operating system that have to be addressed as the numbers of users, of contributors, and of available applications grow. EDOS is a European project supported by IST started October 2004 and ending in 2007, whose objective is to provide a new generation of methodologies, theoretical models, technical tools and quality models specifically tailored to OSS engineering and to software distribution over the Interne...

Effects of Open Source Software on the Business Patterns of Software Industry - Juho Lindman (2005)
Open source software is a phenomenon that has potential to change the traditional patterns of business behavior. Research committed so far has not evaluated the entire scale of potential changes, which is the purpose of this explorative thesis. Previous literature on the subject can be divided into history of the phenomenon, explaining the nature of the phenomenon, and a more general discussion about strategies and business models in the software business. By using these theories this thesis provides a framework for analysing the entire phenomenon. The framework is put to use in the empirical part. Data consist of interviews of experts in the field. An analysis of the data is done using narrative methods. The analysis yield eleven narratives that describe the phenomenon. Four of the narratives reveal effects. On the basis of the responses gathered, open source software can change competition environment, customer expectations, the importance of competence, and platform thinking.

An empirical approach to Software Archaeology - Gregorio Robles; Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona; Herraiz, Israel (In: Poster Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2005)
The term “software archaeology ” provides a useful metaphor of the tasks that a software developer has to face when performing maintenance on large software projects. The source code of a program at any point in time is the result of many different changes performed in the past, usually by several people, which can be tracked when a version control system is used. We have designed a methodology for analyzing with detail the age of the source code in such cases, and have applied it to several large software projects. As a part of the methodology, we define a set of indexes which can help to characterize the history of a software system, and discuss how those could be used to estimate its past and future maintenance. We also show how our approach to software archaeology is simple both conceptually and computationally, but still very powerful at uncovering useful information.

Empirical validation of object-oriented metrics on open source software for fault prediction - Gyimothy, T.; Ferenc, R.; Siket, I. (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2005)
Open source software systems are becoming increasingly important these days. Many companies are investing in open source projects and lots of them are also using such software in their own work. But, because open source software is often developed with a different management style than the industrial ones, the quality and reliability of the code needs to be studied. Hence, the characteristics of the source code of these projects need to be measured to obtain more information about it. This paper describes how we calculated the object-oriented metrics given by Chidamber and Kemerer to illustrate how fault-proneness detection of the source code of the open source Web and e-mail suite called Mozilla can be carried out. We checked the values obtained against the number of bugs found in its bug database - called Bugzilla - using regression and machine learning methods to validate the usefulness of these metrics for fault-proneness prediction. We also compared the metrics of several versions of Mozilla to see how the predicted fault-proneness of the software system changed during its development cycle.
Keywords: bugs; bugzilla; cbo; defects; dit; fault-prone modules; faults; lcom; lcomn; loc; metrics; mozilla; noc; object-oriented; rfc; source code; wmc

Enriching software engineering courses with service-learning projects and the open-source approach - Liu, Chang (Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, 2005)
Real-world software engineers deal with complex problem. Yet many software engineering courses do not involve projects of enough complexity to give students such experience. We sense that service-learning projects, while difficult to manage and sustain, can serve a crucial role in this regard. Through trials in a senior-level software engineering course, we discovered that the open-source approach works well to enable students to work on large, multiple-term service-learning projects. We developed GROw, a cross-term, cross-team educational software process to meet the challenges of adopting complex, real-world projects in one-term courses, and to sustain service learning.
Keywords: education; pedagogical; service learning; software engineering education

Error detection by refactoring reconstruction - Görg, Carsten; Weißgerber, Peter (Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2005)
In many cases it is not sufficient to perform a refactoring only at one location of a software project. For example, refactorings may have to be performed consistently to several classes in the inheritance hierarchy, e.g. subclasses or implementing classes, to preserve equal behavior.In this paper we show how to detect incomplete refactorings - which can cause long standing bugs because some of them do not cause compiler errors - by analyzing software archives. To this end we reconstruct the class inheritance hierarchies, as well as refactorings on the level of methods. Then, we relate these refactorings to the corresponding hierarchy in order to find missing refactorings and thus, errors and inconsistencies that have been introduced in a software project at some point of the history.Finally. we demonstrate our approach by case studies on two open source projects.
Keywords: bugs; class; inheritance; jedit; refactoring; tomcat

Evaluating the Quality and Quantity of Data on Open Source Software Projects - Rainer, Austen; Gale, Stephen (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
In this paper, we provide a preliminary evaluation of the quality and quantity of data on open source (OS) projects, provided at the SourceForge.net portal. We have derived a dataset of approximately 50000 projects from SourceForge. Using several indicators of project activity, we identify two samples from the entire dataset: the ‘most active’ OS projects (a total of 456 projects, ~0.9% of the entire dataset), and those projects with active code development (5826 projects, ~11.6%). The number of projects that are active across all of our main indicators of activity account for less than 1% of the projects on the portal. This suggests that many OS projects being registered on SourceForge are ‘impulse’ projects, which do not gather sufficient interest from developers or users to ‘activate’ those projects and make them ‘successful’. It also suggests that researchers, developers and users should be careful about how they use OS portals.

Evolution and growth in large libre software projects - Gregorio Robles; Amor, J. J.; Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona; Herraiz, I. (Principles of Software Evolution, Eighth International Workshop on, 2005)

Evolution of Open Source Software Systems – A Large-Scale Investigation - Koch, Stefan (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
In this paper, the evolution of a large sample of open source software projects will be analysed. The evolution of commercial systems has been an issue that has long been a center of research, thus a coherent theoretical framework of software evolution has been developed and empirically tested. Therefore these results can be used to compare the situation in open source projects to the evolution of commercial projects. This allows to assess whether the underlying software process indeed significantly differs. The data collection methodology relying on a large software repository and the respective source code control systems is described, and an overview on the collected data on several thousand projects is given. The evolutionary behaviour is explored using both a linear and a quadratic model, with the quadratic model significantly outperforming the linear one. The most interesting fact is that while in the mean the growth rate is decreasing over time according to the l...

Evolution of Open-Source Code Bases EVOSC 2005 - Mattia Monga; Andrea Trentini (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The very essence of open- source software is that it enables custom evolutions. These evolutions should be designed and managed carefully, since merging the main trunk with custom branches is often critical for inheriting evolutions that are not at the core interest of the independent developer.

Evolution of Volunteer Participation in Libre Software Projects: Evidence from Debian - Gregorio Robles; Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona; Martin Michlmayr (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Most libre software projects rely on the work of volunteers. Therefore, attracting people who contribute their time and technical skills is of paramount importance, both in technical and economic terms. This reliance on volunteers leads to some fundamental management challenges: volunteer contributions are inherently difficult to predict, plan and manage, especially in the case of large projects. In this paper we analyze the evolution in time of the human resources of one of the largest and most complex libre software projects composed primarily of volunteers, the Debian project. Debian currently has around 1300 volunteers working on several tasks: much activity is focused on packaging software applications and libraries, but there is also major work related to the maintenance of the infrastructure needed to sustain the development. We have performed a quantitative investigation of data from almost seven years, studying how volunteer involvement has affected the software...
Keywords: contributors; debian; maintainers; PopCon; popularity; Volunteers

Experiences in Discovering, Modeling, and Reenacting Open Source Software Development Processes - Chris Jensen; Walt Scacchi (Software Process Workshop (SPW05): Unifying the Software Process Spectrum, 2005)

Experiences teaching a graduate course in Open Source Software Engineering - Daniel M. German (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper describes the early experiences of a graduate course in open source software engineering at the Department of Computer Science at the University Victoria. It includes a description of the motivation for the course, its structure and evaluation methods. It concludes with a discussion of the lessons learned and its future.
Keywords: course; FOSS; MOTIVATION; open source; open source software engineering

Exploring the Structure of Complex Software Designs: An Empirical Study of Open Source and Proprietary Code (updated) - Alan MacCormack; John Rusnak; Carliss Baldwin (2005)
This paper reports data from a study that seeks to characterize the differences in design structure between complex software products. In particular, we use Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) to map the dependencies between the elements of a design and define metrics that allow us to compare the structures of different designs. We first use these metrics to compare the architectures of two software products - the Linux operating system and the Mozilla web browser - that were developed via contrasting modes of organization: specifically, open source versus proprietary development. We then track the evolution of Mozilla, paying particular attention to a purposeful "re-design" effort that was undertaken with the intention of making the product more "modular." We find significant differences in structure between Linux and the first version of Mozilla, suggesting that Linux had a more modular architecture. We also find that the redesign of Mozilla resulted in an architecture that was significantly more modular than that of its predecessor, and indeed, than that of Linux. Our results, while exploratory, are consistent with a view that different modes of organization are associated with designs that possess different structures. However, we also illustrate that purposeful managerial actions can have a large impact on structure. This latter result is important given recent moves to release proprietary software into the public domain. These moves are likely to fail unless the product possesses an architecture that facilitates participation. Our paper provides evidence that a tightly-coupled design can be adapted to meet this objective.
Keywords: complexity; cost; dependencies; functions; lines of code; linux; loc; mozilla; source code

eZPA portale e-government per enti locali - Colognesi, Cristina; Guandalini, Stefano (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Tra i numerosi settori in cui Internet sta intervenendo con una forte carica di “modernizzazione”, quello dell’e- Government, inteso come possibilità per tutti gli utenti, per tutti i cittadini, di gestire il rapporto con la Pubblica Amministrazione, anche on line, sta producendo gli effetti maggiormente innovativi. L'occasione fornitaci dall'amministrazione del Comune di Ozzano dell'Emilia ha permesso di sviluppare l'applicazione eZPA, scritta con software a codice sorgente aperto e rilasciata con licenza GNU-GPL (General Publish Licence), liberamente utilizzabile e modificabile. Il portale consente la fruibilità telematica dei servizi comunali sia ai clienti esterni (cittadini e imprese), sia agli utenti interni (dipendenti e collaboratori comunali), attraverso una struttura di sportelli fisici/virtuali. In particolare, l'utilizzo della metafora di comunicazione “Evento della vita”,[1] raccomandata dalle linee guida del Ministro per l'Innovazione e le Tecnologie, ha ...
Keywords: e-government; enti locali; INTERNET; open source; pubblica amministrazione

Fare Open Source all'Istat: il generatore di data-entry per indagini statistiche - Altarocca, Francesco; Vaccari, Carlo (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Viene presentata una prima esperienza di sviluppo di software Open Source all'Istat, che riguarda un sistema generalizzato di data-entry per indagini statistiche. L'applicazione, in via di rilascio, copre la fase di acquisizione dati propria delle indagini statistiche e consentirà di generare maschere che potranno essere utilizzate sia in Intranet che sul Web. L'applicazione descritta, che utilizza PHP e XML come tecnologie fondanti, rappresenta un'esperienza concreta di sviluppo Open Source nella quale l'Istat vuole riversare le proprie esperienze specifiche, mettendole poi a disposizione delle altre strutture interessate.
Keywords: data-entry; indagini statistiche; open source; PHP; web; XML

A framework for analyzing levels of analysis issues in studies of e-collaboration - Gallivan, M. J.; Benbunan-Fich, R. (Ieee Transactions on Professional Communication, 2005)
There has been a proliferation of competing explanations regarding the inconsistent results reported by the e-collaboration literature since its inception. This study advances another possible explanation by investigating the range of multilevel issues that can be encountered in research on the use of synchronous or asynchronous group support systems. We introduce concepts of levels of analysis from the management literature and then examine all empirical studies of e-collaboration from seven information systems journals for the period 1999-2003. We identified a total of 54 studies of e-collaboration in these journals, and after excluding 18 nonconforming studies-those that were primarily conceptual, qualitative, or exploratory only-we analyzed the levels of analysis issues in the remaining 36 empirical studies. Based on our analysis and classification of these studies into six different clusters according to their levels of analysis, we found that a majority of these studies contain one or more problems of levels incongruence that cast doubts on the validity of their results. It is indeed possible that these methodological problems are in part responsible for the inconsistent results reported in this literature, especially since researchers frequent decisions to analyze data at the individual level-even when the theory was formulated at the group level and when the research setting featured individuals working in groups-may very well have artificially inflated the authors' chances of finding statistically significant results. Based on our discussion of levels of analysis concepts, we hope to provide guidance to empirical researchers who study e-collaboration.

Framework for Governance in Open Source Projects - Christoph Lattemann; Stefan Stieglitz (2005)
In recent years, the development of software in open source communities has attracted immense attention from research and practice. The idea of commercial quality, free software, and open source code accelerated the development of well-designed open source software such as Linux, Apache tools, or Perl.Intrinsic motivation, group identification processes, learning, and career concerns are the key drivers for a successful cooperation among the participants. These factors and most mechanisms of control, coordination, and monitoring forms of open source communities can hardly be explained by traditional organizational theories. In particular, the micro and macro structures of open source communities and their mode of operation are hardly compatible with the central assumption of the New Institutional Theory, like opportunistic behavior.The aim of this contribution is to identify factors that sustain the motivation of the community members over the entire life cycle of an open source project. Adequate coordination and controlling mechanisms for the governance in open source communities may be extracted.

Free software and open source: The freedom debate and its consequences (Published in First Monday) - Mathias Klang (2005)
To most outsiders the ethics of software is not something usually considered. To most proficient computer users with a passing interest in this question the ethics of software is recognised as one of the fundamental questions in the digital rights area. To most of the latter, terms such as free software, open source, and their derivatives (FLOSS, FOSS, Software Freedom) are interchangeable. Choosing one over the other is a matter of taste rather than politics. However, to most insiders the question is not one of taste. There is a fundamental difference between the two areas even if they share a similar root. Free software is not the same as open source. The two groups differ in their fundamental philosophical approach to software and its importance to society as a whole. This paper examines the two groups? differing philosophies and explores how their actions have affected software development, access to fundamental software infrastructure, and the development of the concept of freedom.

Free software and research - Potortì, Francesco (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Free software licenses are a natural choice in a research environment. In the following, we will try to back this simple statement with some considerations and examples, in an effort to analyse the significant interactions between free software and research.

Free software development communities as a pedagogic model - Francesca Antonacci (Condividere la conoscenza. L'esempio del software libero, 2005)
The pedagogic interest arising from the emergence of free software development communities is twofold. Firstly, in their production practices these communities set out formative processes as well as educational ones. These practices characterise these communities and are not accessory, to the point that without them the communities could not survive. Secondly, these communities are interesting as they make up a particularly rich epistemological model for the understanding of formative, educational and didactical themes. Having embraced the hacker culture, these communities promote and create an incentive to the free circulation of knowledge without protectionist barriers. However, freedom of knowledge alone is not enough, both in the educational and productive fields, unless it is introduced in an organisational model promoting the participation and engagement of the individuals. The communities of free software development are a particularly interesting organisational model because their structure, based on co-operation and solidarity and opposing centralisation, promote the participation of programmers and users all over the world. Thanks to this kind of organisation, which owes much to a model of delegating leadership, authoritative but not authoritarian, charismatic but not idealised these communities are putting together a very large number of work groups. These are geographically, methodologically and culturally non-homogeneous groups, which despite all predictions create highly competitive products of high quality.

The FreeBSD Project: A Replication Case Study of Open Source Development - Trung T. Dinh-Trong; James M. Bieman (IEEE Trans. Software Eng., 2005)
Case studies can help to validate claims that open source software development produces higher quality software at lower cost than traditional commercial development. One problem inherent in case studies is external validity—we do not know whether or not results from one case study apply to another development project. We gain or lose confidence in case study results when similar case studies are conducted on other projects. This case study of the FreeBSD project, a long-lived open source project, provides further understanding of open source development. The paper details a method for mining repositories and querying project participants to retrieve key process information. The FreeBSD development process is fairly well-defined with proscribed methods for determining developer responsibilities, dealing with enhancements and defects, and managing releases. Compared to the Apache project, FreeBSD uses 1) a smaller set of core developers—developers who control the code base—that implement a smaller percentage of the system, 2) a larger set of top developers to implement 80 percent of the system, and 3) a more well-defined testing process. FreeBSD and Apache have a similar ratio of core developers to people involved in adapting and debugging the system and people who report problems. Both systems have similar defect densities and the developers are also users in both systems.
Keywords: apache; bug reports; contributors; core; cvs; defect density; developers; email; email archive; freebsd; mailing list; scm; source code; users

From Planning to Mature: on the Determinants of Open Source Take Off - Stefano Comino (2005)
In this paper we use data from SourceForge.net, the largest open source projects repository, to estimate the main determinants of the progress in the development of a stable and mature code of a software. We find that the less restrictive the licensing terms the larger the likelihood of reaching an advanced development status and that this effect is even stronger for newer projects. We also find that projects geared towards system administrators appear to be the more successful ones. The determinants of projects' development stage change with the age of the project in many dimensions, i.e. licensing terms, software audience and contents, thus supporting the common perception of opens source as a very dynamic phenomenon. The data seem to suggest that open source is evolving towards more commercial applications.

From research prototypes to industrial strength open source products - The ObjectWeb experience - Cecchet, E. (Sofsem 2005:Theory and Practice of Computer Science, 2005)
Open source software has become a common way of disseminating research results. In this talk, we first introduce the motivations and implications of releasing research prototypes as open source software (OSS). ObjectWeb is an international consortium fostering the development of open source middleware. We give an overview of tools available for OSS development and management based on ObjectWeb. experiences. The infrastructure required for hosting such developments is also described; We report various, experiences and practices of small and large ObjectWeb projects in their way to reach the quality of industrial strength products. Finally, we summarize the lessons learned from the success and failures of these projects.

Fun and Software Development - Benno Luthiger Stoll (2005)
This study gathered 1330 answers about fun and software development from open source developers as well as 114 answers from programmers working in commercial software projects. The analysis of these data proves that fun plays an important role when software developers decide to get engaged in an open source project. Moreover, the comparison of the answers gives evidence for the hypothesis that programming in an open source project is significantly more fun compared to the same activity under commercial conditions. The reasons for this fact are that open source projects are able to attract software developers with a credible project vision and that they can offer them an optimal challenge.

Future Development in the European Software Industry: Patentability of Computer Programs or Open Source Software? - Rentocchini, Francesco (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Economic literature has treated the patent system as an indispensable tool to incentive inventive activity and to foster diffusion of technological improvements, but recent developments have brought at the center of the stage the Open Source phenomenon which is based on completely different mechanisms among which the free disclosure of the inventive steps. This work analyzes changes that are taking place into patent literature in order to give account of the desirability of patents in software sector. In addition some ideas on empirical analysis are put forward: the possibility of measuring the relationship between patents and input of innovation process in the software sector and the influence that private firms will have on Open Source developers motivations.
Keywords: european; market segment; open source; os; patent; patent literature; patentability; software industry; software sector

The Future of Open Source. In: Wynants, M. & J. Cornelis (eds.) How Open is the Future? VUB Brussels University Press, pp. 429-59. - Ilkka Tuomi (2005)
Open source has seen phenomenal growth in recent years. In many ways, it has been a great success story. Yet it is interesting to study the conditions that would enable the open-source movement to remain viable and thrive also in the future. This chapter explores the driving forces behind the open source model and its constraints, discussing both the factors likely to promote the continuous growth of the open-source movement and those that could lead to its downfall.

The future of software as a business artefact - Skidmore, Darren (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Rather than look to migration guides for business, or to barriers to adoption of Open Source Software, perhaps we should look to understand what it is that organisations need from their software, it is not just the feature set of the application, but a combination and compromise of the business benefits and business risks, some of which are not inherent in the software feature set, but are interrelated to the needs and pre-existing conditions of the organisation. This paper looks to investigate these aspects of Software to an organisation and to then investigate if Open Source Software can fulfil these factors.

Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics - Christoper Kelty (Cultural Anthropology, 2005)
This article investigates the social, technical, and legal affiliations among "geeks" (hackers, lawyers, activists, and IT entrepreneurs) on the Internet. The mode of association specific to this group is that of a "recursive public sphere" constituted by a shared imaginary of the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in the United States, Europe, and India, I argue that geeks imagine their social existence and relations as much through technical practices (hacking, networking, and code writing) as through discursive argument (rights, identities, and relations). In addition, they consider a "right to tinker" a form of free speech that takes the form of creating, implementing, modifying, or using specific kinds of software (especially Free Software) rather than verbal discourse.

Gender issues in the FLOSS development - Yu-wei Lin (2005)
The FLOSS development is responding to the ICT development in various ways. This essay describes and analyses challenges (societal and organisational) and advantages (e.g. new models for mobile and collaborative work online), particularly regarding gender issues, encountered in the recent FLOSS development. The focus of the essay is not only on the claims made women in the existed FLOSS community about the tensions between male and female developers' interests and ways of doings, but also on the current obstacles against bringing more women, who are not technically competent, to participate in the FLOSS development. This paper concludes with suggestions on how to create rules and resources and the creation of a common FLOSS space for both genders.

The Hacker Ethic and Meaningful Work - Tom Chance (2005)
This paper begins with the following proposition: given that we spend a large proportion of our time working, a just society will provide or encourage meaningful work. Hackers have created and broadened spaces where working life can unfold freely, so a proper analysis of the Hacker Ethic ought to be of concern both to philosophers interested in meaningful work, and to academics researching hackers and the free software community. I proceed by first developing an understanding of the Hacker Ethic that highlights a central concern of my essay, that of orientations that I characterise as self-indulgent and social placing conflicting obligations upon individuals. Using Marx's conception of alienated as a basis, I go on to show how the Hacker Ethic can to an extent overcome these conflicts by developing a more rounded understanding of the ethic. Finally I raise some concerns for the underdeveloped field of the philosophy of hacking and free software that are particularly pertinent to the paper.

Handling variety: the tension between adaptability and interoperability of open source software - Ruben van Wendel de Joode; Tineke M. Egyedi (Computer Standards & Interfaces, 2005)
Open source software (OSS) offers unprecedented opportunities to create variety. This could lead to incompatibility and fragmentation. To prevent this some form of coordination is needed. This paper explores which mechanisms of coordination are responsible for limiting divergence in OSS. Two cases are examined: Java and Linux. A systematic difference seems to exist between the mechanisms identified in the two communities. With respect to Java, divergence is where possible avoided ex ante, whereas for Linux divergence is foremost reduced ex post. The conclusion discusses this difference and the implications of both types of coordination in respect to interoperability.
Keywords: coordination; divergence; java; linux

Hipikat: a project memory for software development - Cubranic, D.; Murphy, G. C.; Singer, J.; Booth, K.S. (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2005)
Sociological and technical difficulties, such as a lack of informal encounters, can make it difficult for new members of noncollocated software development teams to learn from their more experienced colleagues. To address this situation, we have developed a tool, named Hipikat, that provides developers with efficient and effective access to the group memory for a software development project that is implicitly formed by all of the artifacts produced during the development. This project memory is built automatically with little or no change to existing work practices. After describing the Hipikat tool, we present two studies investigating Hipikat's usefulness in software modification tasks. One study evaluated the usefulness of Hipikat's recommendations on a sample of 20 modification tasks performed on the Eclipse Java IDE during the development of release 2.1 of the Eclipse software. We describe the study, present quantitative measures of Hipikat's performance, and describe in detail three cases that illustrate a range of issues that we have identified in the results. In the other study, we evaluated whether software developers who are new to a project can benefit from the artifacts that Hipikat recommends from the project memory. We describe the study, present qualitative observations, and suggest implications of using project memory as a learning aid for project newcomers.

How open is the future (Book - Under creative Commons - Marleen Wynants (2005)
There are two reasons why the free and open-source software issue has become such an inspirational and powerful force today: the rise of the Internet and the growing tendency to protect all intellectual property. Internet technology made it possible to handle massive decentralized projects and irreversibly changed our personal communication and information research. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is a legal instrument which - due to recent excesses - became the symbol of exactly the opposite of what it had been developed for: the protection of the creative process. As a result, free-thinking programmers, scientists, artists, designers, engineers and scholars are daily trying to come up with new ways of creating and sharing knowledge.

How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities - Cosley, D.; D. Frankowski; S. Kiesler; Terveen, L.; Riedl, J. (ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2005)

How Peer Photos Influence Member Participation in Online Communities - Kapoor, N.; Konstan, J.A.; Terveen, L. G. (ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2005)

A human capital perspective of organizational intention to adopt open source software - Yan Li; Chuan-Hoo Tan; Hock-Hai Teo; Alex Siow (International Conference on Information Systems, 2005)
Keywords: Survey

Hybrid Innovation - How Does the Collaboration Between the FLOSS Community and Corporations Happen? - Yu-wei Lin (2005)
Unlike innovation based on a strong professional culture involving close collaboration between professionals in academia and/or corporations, the current Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development entails a global knowledge network, which consists of 1) a heterogeneous community of individuals and organisations who do not necessarily have professional backgrounds in computer science but competent skills to understand programming and working in a public domain; 2) corporations. This paper highlights the importance of the hybrid form of developing and implementing software, and also identifies several key factors shaping the collaboration between OSS firms and the community.

An Hypergraph Based Approach for Unlocking Power Relations in Rhizomatic Open Source Software Communities - Özel, Bülent (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This study, first, points the rhizomatic nature of open source software (OSS) communities. Then, it proposes an hypergraph based research methodology both to capture and to analyze dynamics of OSS communities. An exemplary hypergraph theoretical analysis of power antecedence within rhizomatic network of an OSS community is illustrated.

I Walk the Open Road: Toward an Open Source Philosophy - Robert Cooksey (2005)
This paper addresses the concept of "Open Source" in a philosophical way. It argues that open source is a virtual entity with ontological significance beyond the realm of the software movement that granted its naming. The paper includes an examination of the technical language surrounding open source software, progresses through a philosophical exploration of this language removed from the specificity of computer languages and technologies, and then returns to an analysis of The Open Source Definition in the light of the philosophical investigation.

Idealism and Commercialism – Developing Free/Libre and Open Source Software in Private Businesses - Lundestad, Christian V. (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper presents a PhD research project undertaken as part of a larger project aimed at paying sociological attention to different forms of distribution of knowledge, including program code. We want to investigate empirically how the commons knows as free/open source software is actually made. In my PhD project I study the use and development of FLOSS in private businesses, focusing on professional developers working in private businesses and at the same time participating in the FLOSS community. The theoretical starting point is theories of power, dominance and legitimacy by Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu.
Keywords: dominance; FLOSS; FLOSS community; free/libre; legitimacy; linux; open source; Private Businesses; social organisation; theories of power

Improving Web accessibility through an enhanced open-source browser - Hanson, V. L.; Brezin, J. P.; Crayne, S.; Keates, S.; Kjeldsen, R.; Richards, J. T.; Swart, C.; Trewin, S. (Ibm Systems Journal, 2005)
The accessibilityWorks project provides software enhancements to the Mozilla (TM) Web browser and allows users to control their browsing environment. Although Web accessibility standards specify markup that must be incorporated for Web pages to be accessible, these standards do not ensure a good experience for all Web users. This paper discusses user controls that facilitate a number of adaptations that can greatly increase the usability of Web pages for a diverse population of users. in addition to transformations that change page presentation, innovations are discussed that enable mouse and keyboard input correction as well as vision-based control for users unable to use their hands for computer input.

"Infectious" Open Source Software: Spreading Incentives or Promoting Resistance? - Greg R Vetter (2005)
Some free or open source software infects other software with its licensing terms. Free or open source software is a copyright based licensing system. It typically allows modification and distribution on conditions such as source code availability, royalty-free use and other requirements. Some licenses require distribution of modifications under the same terms. A license is infectious when it has a strong scope for the modifications provision. The scope arises from a broad conception of software derivative works. A strong infectious ambit would apply itself to modified software, and to software intermixed or coupled with non-open-source software. Popular open source software, including the GNU/Linux operating system, uses a license with this feature. This Article assesses the efficacy of broad infectious license terms to determine their incentive effects for open source and proprietary software. The analysis doubts beneficial effects. Rather, on balance, such terms may produce incentives detrimental to interoperability and coexistence between open and proprietary code. As a result, open source licensing should precisely define infectious terms in order to support open source development without countervailing effects and misaligned incentives.

Innovativeness of open source software projects - Krzysztof Klincewicz (2005)
The paper addresses an ongoing debate about the innovativeness of open source projects and critically evaluates the innovative potential of 500 most active projects registered by SourceForge.net. The analysis is based on a proposed framework, distinguishing between radical inventions, technology / platform modifications, and marketing innovations. Research findings include relatively low levels of technical newness in the studies sample, alongside high interest of developers and users in the innovative projects. The article discusses the underlying mechanisms, restricting innovativeness of community-driven open source efforts, and postulates the establishment of an institution of idea brokers playing roles corresponding to venture capitalists in the commercial software domain.

An International Master Programme in Free Software in the European Higher Education Space - Megías, David; Serra, Jordi; Macau, Rafael (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC) offers an International Master programme in Free Software. The first edition of this master programme began on November 2003 and there are about 240 students currently enrolled at the different specialities offered by the program. In this paper, the design, the methodology and the first few conclusions drawn from this higher education experience are discussed and summarized. After this master programme was changed to accomplish with European Higher Education Space (EHES).
Keywords: education; free software; FS community; GNU/Linux; learning; master programme; software development; university

Intrinsic motivations and profit-oriented firms in Open Source software. Do firms practise what they preach? - Cristina Rossi (2005)
A growing body of economic literature is exploring the incentives of the agents involved in the Open Source movement. However, most empirical analyses focus on individual developers and neglect firms that do business with Open Source software (Open Source firms). This paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the incentives of firms that engage in Open Source activities. Data on firms? motivations were collected by a large-scale survey conducted on 146 Italian companies supplying Open Source (OS) solutions and show that intrinsic, community-based incentives do play a role. Nevertheless, these positive attitudes towards the values of the OS community, which are quite surprising by profit-oriented firms, are not in general put into practise. Discrepancy between attitudes and behaviours is a widely investigated phenomenon in social psychology literature. We explore its pattern in our sample, find that it does not concern all the respondents, and single out a group of firms adopting a more consistent behaviour. Our results are in line with the literature on individual motivations in organisations and Open Source business models .

An Investigation of Developer and User Activity In FLOSS Projects - Gale, Stephen (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This document outlines research plans to investigate the evolution of a set of FLOSS (Free, Libre, and Open Source Software) projects and their communities by looking at patterns of developer and user activity through a combination of analysis of archived material and interaction with the project communities. The goal of the proposed research is to better understand the dynamics within FLOSS projects and how some projects become successful.
Keywords: developer; development; FLOSS; FLOSS project; open source; pattern; portal; project

The Jikes research virtual machine project: Building an open-source research community - Alpern, B.; Augart, S.; Blackburn, S. M.; Butrico, M.; Cocchi, A.; Cheng, P.; Dolby, J.; Fink, S.; Grove, D.; Hind, M.; McKinley, K. S.; Mergen, M.; et al. (Ibm Systems Journal, 2005)
This paper describes the evolution of the Jikes (TM) Research Virtual Machine project from an IBM internal research project, called Jalapeno, into an open-source project. After summarizing the original goals of the project, we discuss the motivation for releasing it as an open-source project and the activities performed to ensure the success of the project. Throughout, we highlight the unique challenges of developing and maintaining an open-source project designed specifically to support a research community.

Knowledge, Communication and Innovation: the case of Open Source Software as Open Media - Lorenzo Benussi (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The understanding of the major characteristics of Linux Operative System and, more in general, the analysis of the so-called Open Source Phenomenon, is nowadays a central issue in order to appreciate the ongoing evolution of software industry. Free/Open Source Software model may appears a “revolution” in the way of thinking about software development, distribution and use. But, at a closer glance, it reveals itself more as an “evolution” along the path of “tinkering with software” typical of the Hacker Tech-Culture since the beginning of sixties. In fact the “open source way” of developing software results from the hackers habit of sharing technological knowledge and it represents a perfection of this, due to the availably of new communication technologies. The aim of this research is to explain this evolution, to point out its historical, economics and technological determinants and to link it with the evolution of the “communicational medium” used by the open source ...
Keywords: attributive; Creative Commons; non-commercial

The Launching of Mozilla Firefox - A Case Study in Community-Led Marketing - Sandeep Krishnamurthy (2005)
Mozilla Firefox is a Free/Libre/Open Source (FLOSS) browser supported by the Mozilla Foundation. This browser was recently released and has met with considerable success- it has been downloaded more than 20 million times and has already taken considerable market share from its prime competitor- Microsoft?s Internet Explorer. In this paper, I chronicle how the efforts of 63000 volunteers led to a community successfully competing with a powerful corporation. I identify four factors as the key facilitators to Firefox? success- complacent competition, product superiority, presence of marketing leader and volunteer support.

Legal issues of Open Source Software - Siewicz, Krzysztof (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
From the legal standpoint, Open Source amounts to distributing rights and obligations in software license agreements in such a way, that they would (1) both grant users control over the program and (2) facilitate the sharing of improvements. The Open Source idea aims at reversing the process usually referred to as proprietary licensing and equaling the rights of the users with these of the authors. To some extent, it attempts to destroy monopolies created by copyright laws and to prevent them to arise again. There is much in the discussion on the legal issues of Open Source. The first voices came from the programmers who started the movement.
Keywords: cooperation; copyright law; freedom; intellectual property; legal issue; license; open source software

Linear predictive coding and cepstrum coefficients for mining time variant information from software repositories - Antoniol, Giuliano; Rollo, Vincenzo Fabio; Venturi, Gabriele (Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2005)
This paper presents an approach to recover time variant information from software repositories. It is widely accepted that software evolves due to factors such as defect removal, market opportunity or adding new features. Software evolution details are stored in software repositories which often contain the changes history. On the other hand there is a lack of approaches, technologies and methods to efficiently extract and represent time dependent information. Disciplines such as signal and image processing or speech recognition adopt frequency domain representations to mitigate differences of signals evolving in time. Inspired by time-frequency duality, this paper proposes the use of Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) and Cepstrum coefficients to model time varying software artifact histories. LPC or Cepstrum allow obtaining very compact representations with linear complexity. These representations can be used to highlight components and artifacts evolved in the same way or with very similar evolution patterns. To assess the proposed approach we applied LPC and Cepstral analysis to 211 Linux kernel releases (i.e., from 1.0 to 1.3.100), to identify files with very similar size histories. The approach, the preliminary results and the lesson learned are presented in this paper.
Keywords: change history; data mining; evolution; files; kernel; linear predictive coding; linux; lpc; size; software evolution; source code

Linux on the portuguese schools: the Caixa Mágica experience - Susana Nunes,; Flávio Moringa; Miguel Lourenço; Paulo Trezentos (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This article depicts the experience of Caixa Mágica in the deployment of 14.000 computers with dual boot in the portuguese schools. Caixa Mágica role was preparing its Linux distribution to become friendly to students and teachers. This project was very successful and is now beginning with a second phase with 5.000 more computers. In this experience report with present some of the obstacles and achievements accomplished in “Salas TIC”.

Linux vs. Windows: A comparison of application and platform innovation incentives for open source and proprietary software platforms - Nicholas Economides; Evangelos Katsamakas (2005)
The paper analyzes and compares the investment incentives of platform and application developers for Linux and Windows. We find that the level of investment in applications is larger when the operating system is open source rather than proprietary. The comparison of the levels of investment in the operating systems depends, among others, on reputation effects and the number of developers. The paper also develops a short case study comparing Windows and Linux and identifies new directions for open source software research.

Live! I-Learn @ Home - Baldoni, Matteo; Baroglio, Cristina; Roversi, Luca; Grandi, Claudio (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
In this paper we present a live CD based on GNU/Linux (Knoppix), customized in order to supply a complete working and studying environment for the students of the Corso di Studi in Informatica. In particular, it supplies the Moodle course management system for e-learning complete of the courses of the first year. The aim is to enable the use of such resources off-line and without requiring special skills that will be achieved by studying but that newbies do not have.
Keywords: e-learning; environment; GNU/Linux; java; open source; technology

Looking at Free and Open Source Software: A Study about F/OSS Developers' Culture - Teli, Maurizio (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
My work will be a cultural study of a F/OSS development project, mixing a symmetric approach with the interaction analysis by Erving Goffman. Methodologically I will approach cyber – ethnography.
Keywords: cultural analysis; cultural study; cyber; F/OSS developers; open source; software development

Measuring Success of Open Source Projects Using Web Search Engines - Weiss, Dawid (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
What makes an open source project successful? In this paper we show that the traditional factors of success of open source projects, such as the number of downloads, deployments or community activity are inconvenient to collect or insufficient. We then correlate success of an open source project with its popularity on the Web. We show several ideas of how such popularity could be measured using Web search engines and provide experimental results from quantitative analysis of the measures we introduce on representative large samples of open source projects from SourceForge.

Migrazione di un Sistema Informativo da UNIX-AIX a UNIX-Linux - Colasanti, Cecilia; Patruno, Vincenzo; Vaccari, Carlo (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Il presente documento ha come obiettivo quello di descrivere la politica adottata dall'Istituto Nazionale di Statistica rispetto all'uso del software Open Source. In particolare vengono descritti i sistemi che attualmente operano su piattaforma Linux, quelli che sono in fase di migrazione e le scelte che si sono fatte nel caso di convivenza tra sistemi “open” e sistemi “proprietari”. Viene inoltre illustrata l'architettura hardware scelta nel caso della migrazione di un sistema complesso da piattaforma interamente proprietaria (UNIX AIX) a piattaforma con sistema operativo open Linux Red Hat.
Keywords: architettura hardware; linux; migrazione; open source; server; sistema informativo; sistema proprietario; unix aix

Mining evolution data of a product family - Fischer, Michael; Oberleitner, Johann; Ratzinger, Jacek; Gall, Harald (Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2005)
Diversification of software assets through changing requirements impose a constant challenge on the developers and maintainers of large software systems. Recent research has addressed the mining for data in software repositories of single products ranging from fine- to coarse grained analyses. But so far, little attention has been payed to mining data about the evolution of product families. In this work, we study the evolution and commonalities of three variants of the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), a large open source operating system. The research questions we tackle are concerned with how to generate high level views of the system discovering and indicating evolutionary highlights. To process the large amount of data, we extended our previously developed approach for storing release history information to support the analysis of product families. In a case study we apply our approach on data from three different code repositories representing about 8.5GB of data and 10 years of active development.
Keywords: bsd; change analysis; change history; cvs; evolution; freebsd; netbsd; openbsd; release history; source code; text mining

Mining version histories to verify the learning process of Legitimate Peripheral Participants - Huang, Shih-Kun; Liu, Kang-min (Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2005)
Since code revisions reflect the extent of human involvement in the software development process, revision histories reveal the interactions and interfaces between developers and modules.We therefore divide developers and modules into groups according to the revision histories of the open source software repository, for example, sourceforge.net. To describe the interactions in the open source development process, we use a representative model, Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP) [6], to divide developers into groups such as core and peripheral teams, based on the evolutionary process of learning behavior.With the conventional module relationship, we divide modules into kernel and non-kernel types (such as UI). In the past, groups of developers and modules have been partitioned naturally with informal criteria. In this work, however, we propose a developer-module relationship model to analyze the grouping structures between developers and modules. Our results show some process cases of relative importance on the constructed graph of project development. The graph reveals certain subtle relationships in the interactions between core and non-core team developers, and the interfaces between kernel and non-kernel modules.
Keywords: awstats; bzflag; cvs; filezilla; gallery; Legitimate Peripheral Participants (LPP); moodle; open boundary; open source software development process; phpmyadmin; social networks; sourceforge

Modular Design and the Development of Complex Artifacts: Lessons from Free/Open Source Software - Alessandro Narduzzo; Rossi, Alessandro (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Organizational and managerial theories of modularity applied to the design and production of complex artifacts are used to interpret the rise and success of development methodologies and practices in Free/Open Source software projects. Strengths and risks of the adoption of a modular approach in software project management are introduced and are related to the achievements of various Free/Open Source Software projects (among them: the GNU operating system, the Linux kernel, the HURD kernel). It is suggested that mindful implementation of the principles of modularity may improve the rate of success of many Free/Open Source software projects. Specific case studies here depicted, as well as indirect observation of common programming practices employed by Free/Open Source developers and users, suggest a possible revision towards an improved theory of modularity that may be extended also to settings different from software production.

Multi-Modal Modeling of Open Source Software Requirements Processes - Walt Scacchi; Chris Jensen; Noll, John; Elliott, Margaret (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Understanding the context, structure, activities, and content of software development processes found in practice has been and remains a challenging problem. In the world of free/open source software development, discovering and understanding what processes are used in particular projects is important in determining how they are similar to or different from those advocated by the software engineering community. Prior studies however have revealed that the requirements processes in OSSD projects are different in a number of ways, including the general lack of explicit software requirements specifications. In this paper, we describe how a variety of modeling perspectives and techniques are used to elicit, analyze, and validate software requirements processes found in OSSD projects, with examples drawn from studies of the NetBeans.org project.

The Mysteries of Open Source Software: Black and White and Red All Over? - Fitzgerald, B.; Agerfalk, P.J. (Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2005)
Open Source Software (OSS) has attracted enormous media and research attention since the term was coined in February 1998. The concept itself is founded on the paradoxical premise that software source code-the 'crown jewels' for many proprietary software companies-should be provided freely to anyone who wishes to see it. Given this fundamental initial paradox, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the OSS concept is characterised by contradictions, paradoxes and tensions throughout. In this paper we focus specifically on the following issues in relation to OSS: the cathedral v. bazaar development approach; collectivism v. individualism, the bitter strife within the OSS community itself (OSS v. OSS), and between OSS and the Free Software Foundation (OSS v. FSF); whether OSS represents a paradigm shift in the software industry; whether the software is truly open-the Berkeley Conundrum, as we have termed it here; whether OSS truly is high quality software; and whether OSS is a 'one size fits all,' representing the future model for all software development.

Negotiation and the coordination of information and activity in distributed software problem management - Sandusky, R. J.; Gasser, L. (International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2005)

New approaches to intellectual property : from open software to knowledge based industrial activities - Nicolas Jullien; Jean-Beno\^ıt Zimmermann (2005)
We analyze the question of intellectual property in computer software, showing that both copyright and patents do not fit to the specificities and needs of this industry. The alternative model of Open Source Software, based on a very new juridical concept called GPL "General Public License", tends to take a growing importance. We explain its main characteristics, which consist to impose to the producers to disclose the source-code of the concerned programs and of any further improvement if they re-distribute/resell it. We show that by doing that it introduces a totally different approach of intellectual property within industrial strategies, based on a weaker intellectual protection. We discuss the consequences of such a movement in intistitutional and public policy terms and we enlarge the approach to understand its exemplariness, in the context of a knowledge based economy, for a growing number of industrial activities.

Open and Closed Systems are Equivalent (that is, in an ideal world) - Anderson, Ross (Perspectives on free and open source software, 2005)
...In May 2002, I proved a controversial theorem [8]: that, under the standard assumptions of reliability growth theory, it does not matter whether the system is open or closed. Opening a system enables the attacker to discover vulnerabilities more quickly, but it helps the defenders exactly as much. This caused consternation in some circles, as it was interpreted as a general claim that open systems are no better than closed ones. But that is not what the theorem implies. Most real systems will deviate in important ways from the assumptions of the standard reliability growth model, and it will often be the case that open systems (or closed systems) will be better in some particular application. My theorem lets people concentrate on the differences between open and closed systems that matter in a particular case.
Keywords: security

Open and Collaborative Biomedical Research: Theory and Evidence - Arti Rai (2005)
Although a few commentators have discussed briefly the application of open source-type principles to biomedical research, they have not analyzed carefully how the model is actually being used. In this paper, I draw upon an ongoing, multi-year empirical inquiry into the role of intellectual property in computational biology and associated efforts to evaluate the extent to which the open and collaborative research model may promote socially desirable biomedical innovation ? that is, innovation that produces marginal health benefits in excess of its marginal costs.

Open Beyond Software - Sonali Shah (2005)
The "community-based" model has generated many of the innovations we use on a daily basis. The social structure created by this model has cultivated many entrepreneurial ventures and even seeded new industries and product categories. In this paper, I discuss three elements of this model and present four exemplars of the model that span fields and centuries. I conclude by reframing our view of the innovation process as driven by the activities of firms and research institutions and discussing implications for firms and policy.

Open Source, a development option - Martinez, Arturo (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The Open Source (OS) movement is one of the most amazing revolutions in last decades. It is probably the most successful collaborative project in history. Its philosophy: learn, innovate and share, has created an immense knowledge base which has been opened to everyone. It brings technology to everybody and empowers people, communities, governments and companies. The purpose of this paper is to show how OS solutions, methods and communities can support a number of key areas for a nation's development, at the same time that generates its own infrastructure which not only supports development but also has the potential to become a main business activity for that nation.

Open Source and Business Model Innovation. The Funambol case - Onetti, Alberto; Capobianco, Fabrizio (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
A comprehensive theoretical framework about open source business models is still missing, notwithstanding a growing number of contributions. This lack of literature is mainly due to the relative newness of the phenomena. This paper aims at giving a contribution to the ongoing discussion about open source business implications. The research hypothesis is that open source represents a disruptive innovation for the software industry. The purpose is to understand, through case study research, how open source companies can develop successful business models. Funambol provides an interesting example of an optimized business model, able to leverage the open source advantage in an emerging market. The paper is structured in three main parts: the first one aims at outlining the research hypothesis and methodology. The second part identifies the unique competitive factors distinguishing open source business and the main business implications. The final part focuses on the analys...

Open Source and IMS Learning Design: Building the Infrastructure for eLearning - Griffiths, David; Blat, Josep; Elferink, Ray; Zondergeld, Sara (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The development of open, flexible eLearning specifications has significant implications for and interactions with the FOSS movement. A short overview of eLearning specifications is provided, focusing on the difference between SCORM and Learning Design (LD). The significance of LD for FOSS is examined, and common values identified. The particular contribution made by FOSS to LD infrastructure is discussed, and the importance of reference applications described. An overview is given of the FOSS applications available, divided into design time and run time, with particular reference to LD editors and the CopperCore Learning Design engine.
Keywords: eLearning; eLearning specification; FOSS; infrastructure; Learning Design

Open Source Biotechnology - Janet Hope (2005)
Building on discussions with public and private sector industry participants, funding agencies, leaders of the free and open source software movement and scholars in a range of disciplines, this PhD thesis assesses the desirability and feasibility of extending open source principles to biotechnology research and development. It argues that "open source biotechnology" is both desirable and broadly feasible, and demonstrates that many of the essential elements of an embryonic open source movement are already present in this field.

Open Source Community Building - Matthias Stürmer (2005)
Building an active and helpful community around an open source project is a complex task for its leaders. Therefore investigations in this work are intended to define the optimum starting position of an open source project and to identify recommendable promoting actions by project leaders to enlarge community size in a healthy way. For this paper eight interviews with committed representatives of successful open source projects have led to over 12 hours of conversation about community building. Analysing the statements of these experienced community members exposed helpful activities that led to the presently prospering communities of their projects. Summarizing the conclusions of this qualitative research a table with conditions for successful open source project initialisation and a subject-level promotion matrix of community building could be created. They include suggestions o?n how to start a new open source project and how to improve and increase the community of an already advanced open source project.

Open Source firms: from community to business - Andrea Bonaccorsi; Cristina Rossi (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
A large body of literature is now addressing the Open Source (OS) phenomenon. Economic scholars have deeply investigated the incentives of people working within OS community projects; the software production models in absence of explicit hierarchical structures; the successful dissemination of OS programs in environments dominated by proprietary standards; the peculiarities in the management of intellectual property within the OS framework. Theoretical contributions have coupled with the collection of extensive empirical evidence mainly through surveys taken on individual developers. Nowadays a new trend is shaping the OS movement: more and more firms are entering the market by offering software solutions based on the new paradigm (Open Source firms).
Keywords: business; COMMUNITY; firms; Open Source firms

Open Source for e-Government Application Integration: a PHP-based solution - Gammeri, Simone; Di Cerbo, Francesco; Scotto, Marco; Succi, Giancarlo; Vernazza, Tullio (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper introduces UniGeINT - University of Genoa Integration Tool -, a framework designed to provide integration between several existing tools, databases and data repositories we used in internal administrative processes, by exploiting OSS benefits in terms of costs reduction and bug reporting. Moreover, it adopts state-of-art solutions in Enterprise Application Integration, by using specific design patterns able to match existing IT marrow. So we required in final product common features unmissable for a large scale corporative environment: reliability and fault tolerance, besides to a complete integration with anything previously developed.

Open Source Patenting - Sara Boettiger (2005)
The open source and free software movements have used self-perpetuating copyright licenses to maintain open access to publicly distributed software. This model of licensing has now migrated to the field of biotechnology, where patents rather than copyrights dominate proprietary rights. Consequently, a model for open source patenting or free biotechnology presents a constellation of legal issues not typically found in previous open source licensing. This paper discusses several of these issues, including the nature of the rights transferred, the activities that may trigger the terms of the license, and the legal prohibitions on certain forms of licensing.

Open Source Software in Public Administration. A real example OSS for egovernment Observatories - Davini, Emanuela; Faggioni, Elisabetta; Granatella, Giampiero; Tartari, Dimitri; Scotto, Marco (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Open Source Software (OSS) has risen to great prominence. Briefly, OSS programs are programs whose licenses give users the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify the program, and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified program (without having to pay royalties to previous developers). In the last years the Italian Public Administrations (PA) points out the benefits of using OSS as a valid alternative to closed source software. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the state of the art of OSS in Italian PA and describe two pratical examples of the use of OSS in the e-government area. Those examples are represented by the local e-government observatories developed respectively by Emilia Romagna and Liguria Regions. A real and settled knowledge about current and past egovernment initiatives in Italy can improve the future planning. For these reasons several Italian Regions developed Observatories for e-Government and Informatio...

Open Source software, intrinsic motivations and profit-oriented firms. Do not firms practise what they preach? - Andrea Bonaccorsi; Cristina Rossi (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence on the incentives of firms that engage in Open Source activities. Data collected by a survey on 146 Italian companies supplying OS solutions (Open Source firms) show that (surprisingly) intrinsic, communitybased incentives do play a role but are not, in general, put into practise. The discrepancy between attitudes and behaviours is investigated and firms adopting more consistent behaviours are singled out. Our results are in line with the literature on business models of firms entering the Open Source field.

Open Source: Toward Innovations through Educational Development in China - Hu, Bao-Gang (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper describes the author's personal viewpoints toward open source software, particularly for the educational development in China. The current status of China is presented to explain why open source is critical within the Chinese educational domain. We believe that open source is suitable not only for financial reasons, but also because it will provide an efficient solution for China to establish an innovative environment whilst promoting intellectual capacities. The benefits of using open source are ideal for the current situations in the Chinese educational system. In this paper, one example is given about the promotion activities of the open source software Scilab (SCILAB(c)INRIA-ENPC) in the Chinese educational domain since 2001. Activities demonstrate that open source ideas and practices will have a great impact in China. Lessons and progress are demonstrated from these activities. The final goal of the Chinese educational development is to increase innovati...

Open-source software in an occupational health application: the case of Heales Medical Ltd. - Tiangco, Francis; Stockwell, Alison; Sapsford, John; Rainer, Austen; Swanton, Eamonn (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
In this paper, we provide a case study of a small company, Heales Medical Ltd., that has chosen to use opensource software to develop an online integrated patient management system. We use this case study to examine some preconceptions of open-source technology in the light our experiences of open source in the Heales project. We identify costs and cost savings as being the primary business considerations, and identify software purchase and licensing as key advantages for open-source. We then look at development issues including software evaluation, implementation and programming, and identify these as more costly for open-source, in terms of time and effort expended. We also look at issues to do with open source licensing, which our initial investigations suggest is confusing and requires further analysis. Overall, the ability to modify the source code is regarded as a key benefit of open-source software, but in a business environment like Heales, this is of little imp...

OSS implementation solutions for Public Administration applications - Giacalone, Paolo (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The paper will address the approach used by our company to develop an electronic certified mail solution, called eCertMail, which allows the transmission of documents in electronic form guaranteeing their sending and their reception from a legal point of view, using OS technologies.

Osservatorio Tecnologico: services for open source software at school - Sissa, Giovanna (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Technology Transfer is a keyword in ICT field. OsservatorioTecnologico, the Italian web based national service for technology transfer from ICT to schools, ever since the beginning indicated the Open Source Software (OSS) as one of the main topics. Several services are provided to schools, for example: dissemination of OSS Best Practices in education, guideline about OSS for public sector, monitoring OSS spreading in schools.

OSSmole: A collaborative repository for FLOSS research data and analyses - Howison, James; Conklin, Megan; Kevin Crowston (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper introduces a collaborative project, “OSSmole”, designed to gather, share and store comparable data and analyses of free and open source software development for academic research. The project draws on the ongoing collection and analysis efforts of many research groups, reducing duplication, and promoting compatibility both across sources of FLOSS data and across research groups and analyses. The paper outlines current difficulties with the current typical quantitative FLOSS research process and uses these to develop requirements and presents the design of the system.

OTRS: un sistema a ticket per la gestione dell’help desk - Bencetti, Stefano; Verduci, Gianni (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Descriviamo l’esperienza di utilizzo di un software a codice sorgente aperto per la gestione a ticket dell’help desk informatico del D.I.S.I. (Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze delll’Informazione) dell’Università degli Studi di Genova.
Keywords: help desk; open source; ticketing system; trouble ticket

Penguins, Camels, and Other Birds of a Feather: Brokerage, Boundary Spanning, and Leadership in Open Innovation Communities - Lee Fleming (2005)
What types of human and social capital identify the emergence of leaders of open innovation communities? Consistent with the norms of an engineering culture, we find that future leaders must first make strong technical contributions. Beyond technical contributions, they must then integrate their voluntary communities in order to avoid the ever present danger of forking and balkanization. This is enabled by two correlated but distinct social positions: brokerage, and boundary spanning between technological modules. An inherent lack of trust associated with brokerage positions can be overcome through physical interaction or contributions within technological boundaries. Successful leaders are thus the product of strong technical contribution and a structural position that can bind the community together.

Predicting risky modules in open-source software for high-performance computing - Phadke, Amit A.; Allen, Edward B. (Proceedings of the second international workshop on Software engineering for high performance computing system applications, 2005)
This paper presents the position that software-quality modeling of open-source software for high-performance computing can identify modules that have a high risk of bugs.Given the source code for a recent release, a model can predict which modules are likely to have bugs, based on data from past releases. If a user knows which software modules correspond to functionality of interest, then risks to operations become apparent. If the risks are too great, the user may prefer not to upgrade to the most recent release.Of course, such predictions are never perfect. After release, bugs are discovered. Some bugs are missed by the model, and some predicted errors do not occur. A successful model will be accurate enough for informed management action at the time of the predictions.As evidence for this position, this paper summarizes a case study of the Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSC), which is a mathematical library for high-performance computing. Data was drawn from source-code and configuration management logs. The accuracy of logistic-regression and decision-tree models indicated that the methodology is promising. The case study also illustrated several modeling issues.
Keywords: C4.5; decision trees; empirical case study; high performance computing; logistic regression; Open-source software; PETSc; software metrics; software quality model; software reliability

A Preliminary Analysis of the Influences of Licensing and Organizational Sponsorship on Success in Open Source Projects - Stewart, Katherine J.; Ammeter, Anthony P.; Maruping, Likoebe M. (Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 07, 2005)
This paper develops and tests a model of the impact of licensing restrictiveness and organizational sponsorship on the popularity and vitality of open source software (OSS) development projects. Using data gathered from Freshmeat.net and OSS project home pages the main conclusions derived from the analysis are that organizational sponsorship has a positive effect on project popularity by easing user concerns about cost and quality and that license restrictiveness may have a negative effect on popularity by reducing the perceived utility of open source software. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and the paper outlines several avenues for future research.
Keywords: contributors; developers; freshmeat; license analysis; licensing; metadata; popularity; restrictive; users

Principles for a Dynamic Software Ecosystem - Müller, Benoît (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The open source software movement reflects one of the most dramatic developments in today’s dynamic information technology industry. Interestingly, some commentators have sought to posit open source against proprietary software. This paper argues that while open source and proprietary models may be based on different development and distribution philosophies, neither model is inherently superior.

Process Modeling Across the Web Information Infrastructure - Chris Jensen; Walt Scacchi (Software Process--Improvement and Practice, 2005)

Proprietary Software and Open Source Philosophy: a shift in software’s production methods - De Prato, Giuditta; Gagliardi, Dimitri (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The aim of this paper is to point out that, since the massive growth of Open Source Software (OSS), the production methods of software have changed. The change is not only recognisable within the OSS communities but most evident effects can be also observed in the “proprietary” segment of the market. The data analysis has been performed by allocating a variation towards or away from cooperation/ competition according to the direction of about 12,000 communications, articles and technical notes dated from 1998 up to February 2005. A co-evolution path is identifiable: both the OSS and the proprietary models interchange their original market and production strategies. In the case of the OSS segment, market strategies becomes more business oriented; as a result, systems previously based solely on remote users/producers relations exchange some of the redundancy in its process in favour of a more businessdriven and coordinated production process. On the other hand, proprieta...

The Provision of a Public Good with a direct Provision Technology and Large Number of Agents - Stefan Behringer (2005)
This paper provides a limit result for the provision of a public good in a mechanism design framework as the number of agents gets large. A canonical example for a public good that is produced with a direct provision technology is Open Source Software.

Quality Improvement in Volunteer Free Software Projects: Exploring the Impact of Release Management - Martin Michlmayr (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Even though free software has achieved great popularity and success in recent years, there are a number of product quality challenges facing the open source development model. There is significant room for further quality improvement and one area that deserves special attention is release management. This research will identify problems with current release practices, verify possible advantages of an increasingly popular release model, and develop interventions to improve release management in free software projects. The research also aims to answer the fundamental question as to how volunteer projects can deliver predictable and high quality software.
Keywords: free software; open source; process improvement; quality assurance; release management; volunteer projects

Quality Practices and Problems in Free Software Projects - Martin Michlmayr (2005)
Free software and open source projects are often perceived to be of high quality. It has been suggested that the high level of quality found in some free software projects is related to the open development model which promotes peer review. While the quality of some free software projects is comparable to if not better than that of closed source software, not all free software projects are successful and of high quality. Even mature and successful projects face quality problems, some of which are related to the unique characteristics of free software and open source as a distributed development model based primarily on volunteers. In exploratory interviews performed with free software and open source developers, common quality practices as well as actual quality problems have been identified. The results of these interviews are presented in this paper to take stock of the current status of quality in free software projects and to act as a starting point for the implementation of quality process improvement strategies.

Quantifying the Interest in Open Source Systems: Case South-East Finland - Nikula, Uolevi; Jantunen, Sami (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Open source systems (OSS) has emerged as one of the most interesting phenomena in software engineering today. Unfortunately, only little hard data is available to quantify the interest in OSS in commercially operating software houses. As a part of a local initiative to increase the alignment between the software industry and software engineering research and education, a state of the practice survey was conducted in the local software houses. Due to the globally recognized interest in OSS some explorative questions on the topic were included in the survey. The results of the survey indicate widespread interest in OSS in the industry, and even though the study had a strictly regional focus, the results provide quantitative support for future research on OSS.

Quantitative Analysis of Open Source Projects on SourceForge - Weiss, Dawid (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Relatively easy accessibility of high volumes of information about open source software makes it an interesting target for quantitative analysis meant to discover some hidden properties and trends of this software development model. In this work we demonstrate how such information can be acquired from the largest open source hosting facility — SourceForge — with nearly minimal effort. We compare our data with an identical data set collected a few months earlier by the OssMole [2] project, of which we were not aware at the time of performing the experiment, but which allowed us to make some interesting cross-comparisons and derive conclusions about temporal changes going on at SourceForge.

Recovering system specific rules from software repositories - Williams, Chadd C.; Hollingsworth, Jeffrey K. (Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2005)
One of the most successful applications of static analysis based bug finding tools is to search the source code for violations of system-specific rules. These rules may describe how functions interact in the code, how data is to be validated or how an API is to be used. To apply these tools, the developer must encode a rule that must be followed in the source code. The difficulty is that many of these system-specific rules are undocumented and "grow" over time as the source code changes. Most research in this area relies on expert programmers to document these little-known rules. In this paper we discuss a method to automatically recover a subset of these rules, function usage patterns, by mining the software repository. We present a preliminary study that applies our work to a large open source software project.
Keywords: function usage patterns; functions; source code; wine

Reputation in Open Source Software - Andrew Watson (2005)
The 1990s and early 2000s have seen the dramatic rise of open source software, with the Linux operating system as the most salient example. This article focuses on the role of reputation in open source. It describes the importance of the reputations of hackers, software vendors, open source projects, and the open source movement. Although reputation has long been used as an explanation of hacker motivation, this article applies the concept of reputation at multiple levels, and identifies the inter-level relations.

Risk Assessment of an Open Source Migration Project - Drozdik, Sylvester; Kovács, George L.; Kochis, Pál Zoltán (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
In this paper we investigate the risks of an Open Source migration in the small Public Administration (PA) area. We consider not just technical risks (like security or reliability), but strategic issues (like e-government priorities, mid-term ownership cost items) and some social relations are also taken into consideration.

A Risk Driven Framework for Open Source Information Systems Development - Conlon, Pat; Carew, Peter (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper attempts to justify the need for a framework to address concerns with the use of open source software for information systems development (ISD). The premise of this argument is that the open source paradigm primarily addresses technical concerns while IS failures tend to be multifaceted in nature. OSS may improve but will not ultimately solve the problems of ISD due to its inherent sociotechnical complexities. Issues of concern for open source ISD are identified in this paper and a theoretical framework is outlined allowing organisations to take a more balanced approach to open source ISD. The framework is predicated upon risk management and a lifecycle that addresses social and organisational concerns throughout the ISD process. The objective of this framework is to aid in avoidance of the social and organisational pitfalls of ISD while leveraging the ability of the OSS paradigm to address software crisis issues. Finally, the implications of this framework a...

SchoolTool: Defining Our Niche in the Open Source Architecture of Schools - Hoffman, Tom (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Keywords: information system; open source; school; student

SCQL: a formal model and a query language for source control repositories - Hindle, Abram; Daniel M. German (Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2005)
Source Control Repositories are used in most software projects to store revisions to source code files. These repositories operate at the file level and support multiple users. A generalized formal model of source control repositories is described herein. The model is a graph in which the different entities stored in the repository become vertices and their relationships become edges. We then define SCQL, a first order, and temporal logic based query language for source control repositories. We demonstrate how SCQL can be used to specify some questions and then evaluate them using the source control repositories of five different large software projects.
Keywords: evolution; file; gnumeric; modperl; openssl; revision; samba; scm; source code

Seeking the Source: Software Source Code as a Social and Technical Artifact - De Souza, Cleidson; Jon Froehlich; Paul Dourish (2005)
In distributed software development, two sorts of dependencies can arise. The structure of the software system itself can create dependencies between software elements, while the structure of the development process can create dependencies between software developers. Each of these both shapes and reflects the development process. Our research concerns the extent to which, by looking uniformly at artifacts and activities, we can uncover the structures of software projects, and the ways in which development processes are inscribed into software artifacts. We show how a range of organizational processes and arrangements can be uncovered in software repositories, with implications for collaborative work in large distributed groups such as open source communities.

Shared Source and Open Solutions: an e-Government Perspective - Matusow, Jason; McGibbon, Stephen; Rowe, David (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Over the past four years, increasing commercialisation has been a significant influence on free and open source software. At the same time, the community based collaborative development model, which generally connotes open source, has also been studied and adopted by traditional software companies. These trends have led to an understanding that what separates open source from other software development approaches is the licensing model rather than the development model. Despite this, the two paradigms are rapidly starting to look very similar as open source is increasingly commercialised and established software companies integrate community based development into their value chain. This paper presents Microsoft’s experience with its Intellectual Property Sharing programs and Shared Source Initiative. We also present the Solution Sharing Network, an environment that facilitates the sharing of solutions and best practices. We focus here on public sector customers who ...

Sharing ExperienceS on Agile Methodologies in Open Source Software development SESAMOSS 2005 - Gabriele Gianini; Sillitti, Alberto (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)

Silver bullet or fool's gold: supporting usability in open source software development - Twidale, Michael (Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, 2005)
At first glance it can look like Open Source Software development violates many, if not all, of the precepts of decades of careful research and teaching in Software Engineering. One could take a classic SE textbook and compare the activities elaborated and advocated in the various chapters with what is actually done in plain sight in the public logs of an OSS project in say SourceForge. For a Professor of Software Engineering this might make for rather depressing reading. Are the principles of SE being rendered obsolete? Has OSS really discovered Brooks' Silver Bullet? Or is it just a flash in the pan or Fool's Gold.In this talk I will mainly look at one aspect of Open Source Development, the 'problem' of creating usable interfaces, particularly for non-technical end-users. Any approach involves the challenge of how to coordinate distributed collaborative interface analysis and design, given that in conventional software development this is usually done in small teams and almost always face to face. Indeed all the methods in any HCI text just assume same-time same-place work and don't map to distributed work, let alone the looser mechanisms of OSS development. Instead what is needed is a form of participatory usability involving the coordination of end users and developers in a constantly evolving redesign process.
Keywords: course project; education; lifecycle model; pedagogical; software engineering education; software process

The social construction of freedom in free and open source software: Hackers, ethics, and the liberal tradition - Coleman, E.G. (Anthropology, 2005)
This dissertation, based on fieldwork conducted between January 2001 and May 2003 on the Debian free software project and among hackers living in the Bay area, is an ethnography focused on the ethics and politics of free and open source hackers. My aim in this dissertation is to evaluate the rise of expressive rights among hackers as a historically and culturally specific practice of liberal freedom that can only be made sensible through the lens of a hacker technical way of life--in which their pragmatics and poetics are given serious consideration. Moving and integrating various levels of analysis: the phenomenology of technical praxis, the sociological creation of an ethical practice that unfolds in the hacker public sphere and the FOSS project, and the historical rise of reflective signification through overt political dissent, I offer a comprehensive account of how hackers have come to value and enact freedom, what they mean by it, and suggest some ideas about the broader political effects of their practices. Instead of an emphasis of self-determination and individuality based on the acquisition of property, hackers have placed emphasis on individuality as a form of critical self-determination that requires unrestricted access to knowledge in order to constantly develop technical skills and to progress the state of their technical art. Important for the purposes of this dissertation is that hackers challenge one sacred realm of liberal jurisprudence--intellectual property--by drawing on and reformulating ideals from another one--free speech.
Keywords: culture; hacker

A Social Network Approach To Free/Open Source Software Simulation - Wagstrom, Patrick Adam; Herbsleb, James; Carley, Kathleen (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) development is a complex process that is just beginning to be understood. The actual development process is frequently characterized as disparate volunteer developers collaborating to create a piece of software. The developers of F/OSS, like most software engineers, spend a significant portion of their time fostering collaboration through various channels social communication. We have analyzed several methods of communication; a social networking site, project mailing lists, and developer weblogs; to gain an understanding of the social network structure behind F/OSS projects. This social network data was used to create a model of F/OSS development that allows for multiple projects, users, and developers with varying goals and socialization methods. Using this model we have been able to replicate some of the known phenomena observed in F/OSS and provide a first step in the creation of a robust model of F/OSS.
Keywords: email; mailing list; social network analysis

The social structure of Free and Open Source Software development - Kevin Crowston; James Howison (First Monday, 2005)

Socialization in an Open Source Software Community: A Socio-Technical Analysis - DUCHENEAUT, NICOLAS (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2005)
Open Source Software (OSS) development is often characterized as a fundamentally new way to develop software. Past analyses and discussions, however, have treated OSS projects and their organization mostly as a static phenomenon. Consequently, we do not know how these communities of software developers are sustained and reproduced over time through the progressive integration of new members. To shed light on this issue I report on my analyses of socialization in a particular OSS community. In particular, I document the relationships OSS newcomers develop over time with both the social and material aspects of a project. To do so, I combine two mutually informing activities: ethnography and the use of software specially designed to visualize and explore the interacting networks of human and material resources incorporated in the email and code databases of OSS. Socialization in this community is analyzed from two perspectives: as an individual learning process and as a political process. From these analyses it appears that successful participants progressively construct identities as software craftsmen, and that this process is punctuated by specific rites of passage. Successful participants also understand the political nature of software development and progressively enroll a network of human and material allies to support their efforts. I conclude by discussing how these results could inform the design of software to support socialization in OSS projects, as well as practical implications for the future of these projects.
Keywords: cvs; developers; email; email archive; mailing list; open source project browser; participation; python; scm; source code; team; tools

Socialization practices in FLOSS development teams - Chengetai Masango (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Socialization of new members into Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams is an important but little studied process in producing effective teams of this type. This is a dissertation proposal for a virtual ethnographic study that looks at the mechanisms and processes used to socialize new members into the team in order to help maintain a common group identity and focus.
Keywords: development team; FLOSS; member; open source; socialization

Socio-Technical Interaction Networks in Free/Open Source Software Development Processes - Walt Scacchi (Software Process Modeling, 2005)

Software architecture in an open source world - Roy T. Fielding (Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, 2005)
In spite of the hype and hysteria surrounding open source software development, there is very little that can be said of open source in general. Open source projects range in scope from the miniscule, such as the thousands of non-maintained code dumps left behind at the end of class projects, dissertations, and failed commercial ventures, to the truly international, with thousands of developers collaborating, directly or indirectly, on a common platform. One characteristic that is shared by the largest and most successful open source projects, however, is a software architecture designed to promote anarchic collaboration through extensions while at the same time preserving centralized control over the interfaces. This talk features a survey of the state-of-the-practice in open source development in regards to software architecture, with particular emphasis on the modular extensibility interfaces within several of the most successful projects, including Apache httpd, Eclipse, Mozilla Firefox, Linux kernel, and the World Wide Web (which few people recognize as an open source project in itself). These projects fall under the general category of collaborative open source software development, which emphasizes community aspects of software engineering in order to compensate for the often-volunteer nature of core developers and take advantage of the scalability obtainable through Internet-based virtual organizations.
Keywords: apache; collaborative open source development; eclipse; extensibility; Firefox; linux; linux kernel; loose coupling; modularity; mozilla; open source; software architecture

Software engineering education in the era of outsourcing, distributed development, and open source software: challenges and opportunities - Hawthorne, Matthew J.; Perry, Dewayne E. (Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, 2005)
As software development becomes increasingly globally distributed, and more software functions are delegated to common open source software (OSS) and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, practicing software engineers face significant challenges for which current software engineering curricula may leave them inadequately prepared. A new multi-faceted distributed development model is emerging that effectively commoditizes many development activities once considered integral to software engineering, while simultaneously requiring practitioners to apply engineering principles in new and often unfamiliar contexts. We discuss the challenges that software engineers face as a direct result of outsourcing and other distributed development approaches that are increasingly being utilized by industry, and some of the key ways we need to evolve software engineering curricula to address these challenges.
Keywords: computer science education; contextual learning; education; informatics; software engineering education

Software Problem Management as Information Management in a F/OSS Development Community - Sandusky, Robert J. (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Bug reports created by a large, successful open source software development community show that software problem management (SWPM) is first of all information management and secondarily a problem solving activity. Solving software problems occurs only after a bug report, a first-class information object, has been created and “triaged” by community members. One predominant structural feature of defect tracking repositories is the evolving "bug report network" (BRN). Community members create BRNs by progressively asserting various formal and informal relationships between bug reports (BRs). In one F/OSS bug repository under study, participants assert two formal relationships (duplications and dependencies) and various informal relationships (like "see also" references). BRNs can be interpreted as (1) information ordering strategies that support collocation of related BRs, decreasing cognitive and organizational effort; (2) sense-making strategies wherein BRNs provide mor...

Software Process Maturity and the Success of Free Software Projects - Martin Michlmayr (2005)
The success of free software and open source projects has increased interest in utilizing the open source model for mature software development. However, the ad hoc nature of open source development may result in poor quality software or failures for a number of volunteer projects. In this paper, projects from SourceForge are assessed to test the hypothesis that there is a relationship between process maturity and the success of free software and open source projects. This study addresses the question of whether the maturity of particular software processes differs in unsuccessful and unsuccessful projects. Processes are identified which are key factors in successful free software projects. The insights gained from this study can be used improve the software process used by free software projects.

Some Economic & Legal Aspects of Open Source Software - Jonathon Frost (2005)
The emergence of open source software as a viable economic model has risen to the forefront in the debate on the future of the information technology industry. However, at first glance, the open source software development model is strikingly enigmatic and counterintuitive. To help better understand this phenomenon, this paper, through market data and economic theory, proceeds to ask and answer three related questions. First, what is the economic relationship between open source software development communities and proprietary software firms? Second, what are the resulting effects on market innovation and innovation incentives? And third, what legal mechanisms allow for the sustainability of open source software and should they be expanded or reduced? This paper concludes that open source activity appears to be generating four economic effects, whose net effect on innovation in the software market is ambiguous.

Source code review systems - Remillard, J. (Ieee Software, 2005)

Stimulating Collaborative Development in Operations Research with libOR - Ven, Kris; Sörensen, Kenneth; Verelst, Jan; Sevaux, Marc (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
In this paper we describe the development of libOR, an on-line library for the operations research (OR) community. The design and operation of this website is inspired by the Open Source movement and recent developments such as Wikipedia. In operations research, data sets are exchanged between researchers in order to test the performance of newly developed algorithms. Currently, the exchange of these data sets suffers from many problems. One of the main problems is that data sets are currently exchanged through a centrally maintained website, which makes it slow to respond to new developments. By applying an Open Source approach to content creation, we hope to spur the diffusion of information within the operations research community.

Stopping spyware at the gate: a user study of privacy, notice and spyware - N. Good; Dhamija, R.; J. Grossklags; D. Thaw; Aronowitz, S.; D. Mulligan; J. Konstan (2005 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, 2005)
Keywords: agreement,; and; Aspects,; Design,; end; EULA,; Experimentation,; Factors,; Human; Legal; license; notice,; of; privacy,; security; service,; spyware,; terms; ToS,; usability,; user

A structurational perspective on leadership in Free/Libre Open Source Software teams - Kevin Crowston; Robert Heckman; Hala Annabi; Chengetai Masango (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
In this conceptual paper, we present a structuration- based theory of leadership behaviours in self-organizing distributed teams such as Free/Libre Open Source Software development teams. Such teams are often composed of members of relatively equal status or who are so disparate in background that formal organizational status seems irrelevant, reducing the usual leadership cues provided by organizational status and title. Building on a functional view of leadership and structuration theory, we suggest that leaders are individuals who develop team structures that then guide the actions of team members. Specifically, we examine structures of signification in the form of shared mental models, structures of domination in the form of role structures and structures of legitimation in form of rules and norms. The main contribution of our paper is the integration of various social theories to describe emergent leadership behaviours in distributed teams. We develop a set of prop...

Structure, Cohesion, and Open Source Software Success - Sherae Daniel (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper proposes a dissertation designed to understand how the open source software (OSS) development group and its associated interest community jointly and independently impact OSS success for a single OSS project.
Keywords: interest community; network externalities; open source software; software quality

A Successful Business Model for Free Software - Ayre, Jamie; Gasperoni, Franco (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The objective of this article is to offer a return on experience explaining how the legal fundamentals on which Free Software is based allow for a long-lasting business model based on a special kind of expert knowledge-based support that benefits customers and guarantees the creation of a local pool of expertise. This article is based on our experience with GNAT Pro. GNAT Pro is the Free Software development environment for the Ada 95 programming language. It comprises a compiler that is part of GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection), a toolset and graphical Integrated Development Environment, and a set of supporting libraries. Developing, maintaining, and marketing GNAT Pro for ten years have provided significant experience with both technical and non-technical aspects of Free Software. This article summarizes the principal legal and business lessons learned.

A Techno-Feminist Perspective on the Free/Libre Open Source Software Development - Yu-wei Lin (2005)
This paper tries to analyse the FLOSS development from a "techno-feminist" perspective (Wajcman 2004). Staying away from a reductionism that simplifies the gender issue in the FLOSS community to the level of a fight between men and women, the issues I attempt to address include not only the inequality that women face in computing, but also other inequalities that other users face mainly emerging from the power relationships between expert and lay (namely, developer and user) in software design. Instead of splitting women and men in the FLOSS development, this analysis helps motivate both men and women to work together, reduce the gender gap, and improve the disadvantaged statuses of women and a wider users community in the FLOSS development.

Thematic Coherence and Quotation Practices in Open Source Software design-oriented online discussions - F. Barcellini; F. Detienne; J. M. Burkhardt; W. Sack (Group '05 Conference Proceedings, 2005)
This paper presents an analysis of online discussions in Open Source Software (OSS) design. The objective of our work is to understand and model the dynamics of OSS design that take place in mailing list exchanges. We show how quotation practices can be used to locate design relevant data in discussion archives. OSS developers use quotation as a mechanism to maintain the discursive context. To retrace thematic coherence in the online discussions of a major OSS project, Python, we follow how messages are linked through quotation practices. We compare our quotation-based analysis with a more conventional analysis: a thread-based of the reply-to links between messages. The advantages of a quotation-based analysis over a thread-based analysis are outlined. Our analysis reveals also the links between the social structure and elements in the discussion space and how it shapes influence in the design process.

A Theory of Disclosure for Security and Competitive Reasons: Open Source, Proprietary Software, and Government Systems - Swire, Peter P (Hous. L. Rev., 2005)
A previous article, “A Model for When Disclosure Helps Security: What is Different about Computer and Network Security?” proposed a model for when disclosure helps or hurts security and provided reasons why computer security is often different in this respect than physical security. This chapter provides a general approach for describing the incentives of actors to disclose information about their software or systems. A chief point of this chapter is that the incentives of disclosure depend on two largely independent assessments: (i) the degree to which disclosure helps or hurts security
Keywords: security

The Theory Of FOSS And Its Acceptance In Developing Nations - Shiyevina Amelia Abdool (2005)
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is on the march across the globe, and it offers a reliable alternative to proprietary, commercial products and addresses the full range of users' needs. For example FOSS Apache provides the majority of web pages due to its huge installed user base, with the last figures showing Apache occupying 67% of all web sites world wide. Since FOSS is world class, (i.e. it is free to share/distribute amongst individuals, clients, offices, etc.) and can be modified according to an individual's/organization's motives, it may be viewed as a competitor to proprietary and commercial products. For instance, when compared to the existing standard, user-friendly programs that run on Microsoft Windows and Apple operating systems, FOSS offers alternate operating systems that can be used on all computer systems and a range of Internet server software with advanced functionality.

Towards an Open Source Development Process - Evaluating the Migration to an Open Source Project by Means of the Capability Maturity Model - Bleek, Wolf-Gideon; Finck, Matthias; Pape, Bernd (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
In this paper we review the ongoing development of a Web-based community system that has been migrated from a closed software development to an open source project. We identify three different phases in the migration process where the development process changed significantly. We analyse these phases by means of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). The insights gained show the implications of such a migration process towards open source concerning the process quality of a development process. They also show underlying assumptions of the CMM that do not totally match with developments in this specific case study. As a helpful outcome, our reflection about the ongoing software development process helped identify two crucial factors: reflection about the process is possible even at lower levels and how to handle people's fluctuation to sustain a development project.

Towards Supporting Agile Practice Within The Libre Software Paradigm - Adams, Paul; Boldyreff, Cornelia (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Individual agile methods have never been practiced as defined, in the same way that Royce's waterfall [1] model never reflected actual practice. Instead, practitioners adapted the core principles of these processes in order to suit their needs. Understanding this is key to appreciating the agile mindset. What does exist is a set of principles1 which, when followed loosely, form the agile practices. It is an important part of the agile mentality that the individuals within a project are more important that the process they follow. However, the individual methods do have their own identifying features that make them unique; for example testing must be performed before coding within eXtreme Programming (XP) [2]. However, if practitioners were to apply XP, exactly as Beck describes it, then they are probably not “doing agile” as they may not be following the process that suits their needs best. One of the interesting features of the XP method is its requirement of a collocated team. Th...
Keywords: agile methods; agile practice; extreme programming; libre software; open source; XP

Transfering Libre Software Development Practices to the Production of Educational Resources: the Edukalibre Project - González-Barahona, Jesús M.; Chris Tebb; Vania Dimitrova; Chaparro, Diego; Romera, Teo (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The transfer of methodologies common in libre (free, open source) sofware development to the domain of educational resources can radically change the way educational content is developed and used, enabling both educational practitioners and students to become actively involved in its creation and distribution. New software architectures and tools are needed to effectively support this process. This paper describes a platform aimed to support the creation of free, collaboratively constructed educational content on the web, which has been developed within the Edukalibre project. It provides easy access to core technologies: a control version system combined with conversion tools to produce several convenient formats for each document. Its modular architecture offers many different interfaces to the users. The Edukalibre platform is distributed as libre software.
Keywords: educational resources; information systems; open source; software development practices

Two-sided competition of proprietary vs. open source technology platforms and the implications for the software industry - Nicholas Economides; Evangelos Katsamakas (2005)
Technology platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, are the hubs of technology industries. We develop a framework to characterize the optimal two-sided pricing strategy of a platform firm, that is, the pricing strategy towards the direct users of the platform as well as towards firms offering applications that are complementary to the platform. We compare industry structures based on a proprietary platform (such as Windows) with those based on an open-source platform (such as Linux) and analyze the structure of competition and industry implications in terms of pricing, sales, profitability, and social welfare. We find that, when the platform is proprietary, the equilibrium prices for the platform, the applications, and the platform access fee for applications may be below marginal cost, and we characterize demand conditions that lead to this. The proprietary applications sector of an industry based on an open source platform may be more profitable than the total profits of a proprietary platform industry. When users have a strong preference for application variety, the total profits of the proprietary industry are larger than the total profits of an industry based on an open source platform. The variety of applications is larger when the platform is open source. When a system based on an open source platform with an independent proprietary application competes with a proprietary system, the proprietary system is likely to dominate the open source platform industry both in terms of marketshare and profitability. This may explain the dominance of Microsoft in the market for PC operating systems.

Un'applicazione Open Source: l'Osservatorio sull'e-government e la società dell'informazione - Tartari, Dimitri (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
I processi d'innovazione, conseguenza dei progetti di e-government, che da alcuni anni interessano gli EELL, possono essere apprezzati solo se osservati nella loro veste di azioni integrate comuni a più soggetti. Predisporre uno strumento logico-tecnologico che colmi le carenze informative e che sia di supporto, alle amministrazioni territoriali, in sede di programmazione e pianificazione delle politiche è quanto si è sperimentato in Regione Emilia-Romagna. Sono stati così realizzati una banca dati ed un applicativo web-based, entrambi basati su componenti software Open Source. Tale scelta è stata dettata dalla volontà di diffondere e facilitare questa pratica in altre realtà territoriali. Questo esperimento, oramai attività consolidata, ha prodotto risultati informativi per il territorio regionale ed è punto di partenza per un'evoluzione su scala nazionale.

Understanding source code evolution using abstract syntax tree matching - Neamtiu, Iulian; Foster, Jeffrey S.; Hicks, Michael (Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2005)
Mining software repositories at the source code level can provide a greater understanding of how software evolves. We present a tool for quickly comparing the source code of different versions of a C program. The approach is based on partial abstract syntax tree matching, and can track simple changes to global variables, types and functions. These changes can characterize aspects of software evolution useful for answering higher level questions. In particular, we consider how they could be used to inform the design of a dynamic software updating system. We report results based on measurements of various versions of popular open source programs, including BIND, OpenSSH, Apache, Vsftpd and the Linux kernel.
Keywords: abstract syntax trees; apache; bind; evolution; linux; openssh; software evolution; source code; source code analysis; vsftpd

Understanding the Open-Source Software Development Process: a Case Study with CVSChecker - Liu, Ying; Stroulia, Eleni; Erdogmus, Hakan (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
The open-source process model is emerging as a new lightweight paradigm for software development and has already produced several successful products. This process is fundamentally different from more traditional analysis- and design-driven processes, which raises a set of interesting research questions: what activities are carried out in open-source projects and by whom? Are there typical or exceptional patterns? CVSChecker is a tool designed to analyze the performance of individual developers and the work-distribution patterns of teams based on historical source-code repository data. In this paper, we report on a case study conducted using CVSChecker to examine a small open-source project. We discuss the insights that the CVSChecker analysis produced regarding this project and compare them to results from previous case studies performed with senior student teams.

Unreliable Collaborators: Coordination in distributed volunteer teams - Howison, James (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Drawing together the interest, skills and resources of individuals to pursue productive activity is the cornerstone of wealth creation. Recently, new forms of productive activity have emerged that draw together highly motivated, often volunteer, participants to collaborate through low-cost information systems to produce high quality products that rival those produced by wealthy firms and markets. Examples include free (librÂ´e) and open source software (FLOSS), such as Linux, and collaboratively edited texts, such as Wikipedia and the Open Directory. There is an opportunity to study these novel activities, to understand their organization, in order to both further their continued success and to assess whether and which of their novel organization techniques might be used in wider domains of human collaborative activity.
Keywords: coordination; floss organization; MOTIVATION; open source; volunteer teams

Using a clone genealogy extractor for understanding and supporting evolution of code clones - Kim, Miryung; Notkin, David (Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2005)
Programmers often create similar code snippets or reuse existing code snippets by copying and pasting. Code clones —syntactically and semantically similar code snippets—can cause problems during software maintenance because programmers may need to locate code clones and change them consistently. In this work, we investigate (1) how code clones evolve, (2) how many code clones impose maintenance challenges, and (3) what kind of tool or engineering process would be useful for maintaining code clones. Based on a formal definition of clone evolution, we built a clone genealogy tool that automatically extracts the history of code clones from a source code repository (CVS). Our clone genealogy tool enables several analyses that reveal evolutionary characteristics of code clones. Our initial results suggest that aggressive refactoring may not be the best solution for all code clones; thus, we propose alternative tool solutions that assist in maintaining code clones using clone genealogy information.
Keywords: clone; clone detection; cvs; developers; evolution; maintenance; refactoring; source code

Using Open Source Middleware for Securing e-Gov Applications - Ardagna, Claudio Agostino; Damiani, Ernesto; Frati, Fulvio; Montel, Martin (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Nowadays, a global information infrastructure connects remote parties through the use of large scale networks, and many companies focus on developing e-services based on remote resources and on interaction between remote parties. In such a context, e-Government (e-Gov) systems became of paramount importance for the Public Administration, and many ongoing development projects are targeted on their implementation and release. For open source software to play an important role in this scenario, two main technological requirements must be fulfilled: (i) the identification and optimization of de facto standards for building e-Gov open source software components and (ii) a standard integration strategy of these components into an open source middleware layer, capable of conveying a completely open-source e-Gov solution. In this paper, we argue that e-Gov systems should be constructed on a open source middleware layer, providing full public responsibility in its development. W...

Using Open Source Tools to Support Collaboration Within CALIBRE - Adams, Paul; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
This paper describes the deployment of Plone, an Open-Source content management system, to support the activities of CALIBRE, an EU-funded coordination action integrating research into Libre software. The criteria by which Plone was selected are described, and the goodness of fit to these criteria is analysed. As a coordination action, CALIBRE involves 12 partners with different requirements and characteristics. The CALIBRE Working Environment (CWE) must therefore support a variety of users with different levels of technical expertise and expectations. Implementation of the support infrastructure for CALIBRE is ongoing, and has provided some interesting insights into the benefits of the use of libre software. Although Plone has not been explicitly developed as a collaboration infrastructure, with its wealth of plugins, it has proven highly adaptable for this purpose.

Using Plone To Support Collaborative Research - Adams, Paul; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen; Boldyreff, Cornelia (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Keywords: collaboration environment; collaborative research; content management system; open source; plugin

Using the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma for Explaining the Evolution of Cooperation in Open Source Communities - Eckert, Daniel; Koch, Stefan; Mitlöhner, Johann (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
Software development, and especially open source projects, typically involve repeated interactions between participants and groups of participants. We propose to analyse this situation by means of the standard model for the evolution of cooperation, the iterated prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma is a well-known model for a two-person game, in which each side can choose to either cooperate or defect, and in which the payoffs are arranged in a defined hierarchy (e.g. the highest payoff is achieved by defecting while the other player cooperates). As a first step, the prisoner's dilemma needs to be formulated for the open source development model, i.e. what constitutes cooperation, playing defect and payoffs. Then, computer simulations using a population of stochastic reactive strategies can be applied, using a strategy's payoff as fitness measure for determining its frequency in the next generation. As a further extension, the effects of misinterpretation of other...

Virtual Square - Davoli, Renzo (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
It is common to call “virtual world” the set of abstractions given to humans by computers and networks. When the computers and the networks are emulated by programs, i.e. are virtual machines and virtual networks, there is one more layer of virtuality: a kind of virtual squared world. Virtual square (V²) is the project to study how to exploit the possibilities given by multi layered virtuality. V² integrates the existing technologies in system emulation with a new overlay network that is able to integrate virtual machines, real computers and processes. The virtual networking infrastructure, the educational virtual machine uMPS and the user level network virtual machine Ale4NET are original contributions made by this project. All the code developed for Virtual Square as well as all the code of the other virtual machines presented here have been released as Open Source or Free Software.

Webservice Protocol Design for Economic Liberty and Observability - Norbert Bollow (2005)
One big potential benefit of the webservices paradigm is in reducing the costs of inter-firm business transactions. That should allow small and medium-sized enterprises to compete successfully with big firms. This paper considers specifically the economic needs of peer-to-peer business alliances, defined as multiparty business alliances which are not under the control of any single firm or any small group of alliance members, so that each participating firm has full economic liberty. This organisational form is appropriate for example for Free Software businesses. The main conclusions are that achieving economic observability of business transactions is of great importance, and that this is difficult to achieve with the Remote Procedure Calls paradigm of JINI or XML / HTTP / SOAP based webservices. The problem can be overcome by using the SXDF / QQP / QRPC suite of webservice protocols,

What is the significance of Open Source Software for the education and training community? - Attwell, Graham (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)
There is growing interest in the education community in the development and use of Open Source Software. This paper explains the ideas behind OSS and how what its significance is for education. It examines regional and national initiatives to promote the use of OSS. The paper considers the advantages of OSS and potential problems. It goes on to look at the idea of open content and the sharing of learning content, and provides short case studies. The paper concludes that the major significance of OSS and open content is in the new social relations engendered and in fostering innovation in e-learning, both in application development and new pedagogies.
Keywords: economic issues; education; open source; pedagocic impact; training

When do changes induce fixes? - Sliwerski, J; Zimmermann, Thomas; Zeller, Andreas (Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, 2005)
As a software system evolves, programmers make changes that sometimes cause problems. We analyze CVS archives for fix-inducing changes—changes that lead to problems, indicated by fixes. We show how to automatically locate fix-inducing changes by linking a version archive (such as CVS) to a bug database (such as BUGZILLA). In a first investigation of the MOZILLA and ECLIPSE history, it turns out that fix-inducing changes show distinct patterns with respect to their size and the day of week they were applied.
Keywords: bugzilla; change analysis; cvs; eclipse; evolution; mozilla

Why and how-to contribute to libre software when you integrate them into an in-house application ? - Christian Bac; Olivier Berger; Véronique Deborde; Benoit Hamet (Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Open Source Systems, 2005)
Free or open source software are common tools that everybody can use and customise at its convenience to create in-house applications. Using and customising free software is not sufficient to ensure that this in-house application will be maintainable at mid or long term. This paper draws lessons from our in-house project, the development of a groupware Web platform for researchers, to help defining a policy through which efficient contributions can be made to open source software so that the in-house projects may remain viable.

Why hackers do what they do: Understanding motivation and effort in free/open source software projects - Karim R Lakhani; Wolf, R. (Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, 2005)

Workshop on "Open Source and Multimedia" - Julien Bourgeois; François Spies; Dodero, Gabriella; Vittoria Gianuzzi (OSS2005: Open Source Systems, 2005)

Advancing Economic Research on the Free and Open Source Software Mode of Production - Jean-Michel Dalle (2004)
Early contributions to the academic literature on free/libre and open source software (F/LOSS) movements have been directed primarily at identifying the motivations that account for the sustained and often intensive involvement of many people in this non-contractual and unremunerated productive activity. This issue has been particularly prominent in economists' contributions to the literature, and it reflects a view that widespread voluntary participation in the creation of economically valuable goods that is to be distributed without charge constitutes a significant behavioral anomaly. Undoubtedly, the motivations of F/LOSS developers deserve to be studied more intensively, but not because their behaviors are unique, or historically unprecedented. In this essay we argue that other aspects of the "open source" phenomenon are just as intriguing, if not more so, and possibly are also more consequential topics for economic analysis. We describe the re-focusing and re-direction of empirical and theoretical research in an integrated international project (based at Stanford University/SIEPR) that aims at better understanding a set of less widely discussed topics: the modes of organization, governance and performance of F/LOSS development – viewed as a collective distributed mode of production.. We discuss of the significance of tackling those questions in order to assess the potentialities of the "open source way of working" as a paradigm for a broader class of knowledge and information-goods production, and conclude with proposals for the trajectory of future research along that line.

Applying Social Network Analysis to the Information in CVS Repositories - Luis Lopez (2004)
The huge quantities of data available in the CVS repositories of large, long-lived libre (free, open source) software projects, and the many interrelationships among those data offer opportunities for extracting large amounts of valuable information about their structure, evolution and internal processes. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of that information renders it almost unusable without applying methodologies which highlight the relevant information for a given aspect of the project. In this paper, we propose the use of a well known set of methodologies (social network analysis) for characterizing libre software projects, their evolution over time and their internal structure. In addition, we show how we have applied such methodologies to real cases, and extract some preliminary conclusions from that experience.

Applying Social Network Analysis to the Information in CVS Repositories - López-Fernández, L.; Gregorio Robles; Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona (International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2004), 2004)
The huge quantities of data available in the CVS repositories of large, long-lived libre (free, open source) software projects, and the many interrelationships among those data offer opportunities for extracting large amounts of valuable information about their structure, evolution and internal processes. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of that information renders it almost unusable without applying methodologies which highlight the relevant information for a given aspect of the project. In this paper, we propose the use of a well known set of methodologies (social network analysis) for characterizing libre software projects, their evolution over time and their internal structure. In addition, we show how we have applied such methodologies to real cases, and extract some preliminary conclusions from that experience.
Keywords: apache; complex networks; cvs; gnome; kde; libre software engineering; source code; source code repositories; visualization techniques; vizualization

Appropriating the Commons: Firms in Open Source Software - Linus Dahlander (2004)
Firms in open source software (OSS) are active in a field encompassing all the characteristics of a public good, given the non-excludability and non-rivalry nature of OSS. As the case of OSS demonstrates, the fact that many important inputs to the innovative process are public should not be taken to mean that innovators are prevented from capturing private returns. The objective of this paper is to explore how firms appropriate returns from innovations that are created outside the boundaries of firms and in the public domain using the case of OSS. To do so, the paper draws upon an explorative multiple case study of six small firms that attempt to appropriate returns from OSS, with rich empirical evidence from various data sources. The cases illustrate how firms try a variety of approaches to appropriate adequate returns and that selling services seem to be the dominant trend. Firm also balance the relative inefficiency of traditional means of intellectual property right such as patents by putting greater emphasis on first mover advantages and creating network externalities.

The Architecture of Cooperation: How Code Architecture Mitigates Free Riding in the Open Source Development Model - Carliss Baldwin (2004)
We argue that the architecture of a codebase is a critical factor that lies at the heart of the open source development process. To support this argument, we define two observable properties of an architecture: (1) its modularity and (2) its option values. Developers can make informed judgments about modularity and option value from early code releases. Their judgments in turn will influence their decisions to work and to contribute their code back to the community. We go on to suggest that the core of the open source development process can be thought of as two linked games played within a codebase architecture. The first game involves the implicit exchange of effort directed at the modules and option values of a codebase; the second is a Prisoners' Dilemma game triggered by the irreducible costs of communicating. The implicit exchange of effort among developers is made possible by the the non-rivalrous nature of the codebase and by the modularity and option values of the codebase's architecture. This exchange creates value for all participants, both workers and free-riders. In contrast, the Prisoners' Dilemma is a problem that must be surmounted if the exchanges are to take place. It can be addressed through a combination of reducing the costs of communication, providing rewards, and encouraging repeated interactions. Finally, the initial design and "opening up" of a codebase can be seen as a rational move by an architect who is seeking to test the environment in hopes of initiating exchanges of effort with other developers.

Bug driven bug finders - Williams, C.C.; Hollingsworth, J.K. (Proceedings of the 2004 international workshop on Mining software repositories - MSR '04, 2004)
We describe a method of creating tools to find bugs in software that is driven by the analysis of previously fixed bugs. We present a study of bug databases and software repositories that characterize commonly occurring types of bugs. Based on the types of bugs that were commonly reported and fixed in the code, we determine what types of bug finding tools should be developed. We have implemented one static checker, a return value usage checker. Novel features of this checker include the use of information from the software repository to try to improve its false positive rate by identifying patterns that have resulted in previous bug fixes.
Keywords: apache; bug tracking; bugs

Collaboration, Leadership, Control, and Conflict Negotiation in the NetBeans.org Community - Chris Jensen; Walt Scacchi (4th. Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering, 2004)
Keywords: netbeans

Collaboration, Leadership, Control, and Conflict Negotiation in the Netbeans.org Community - Chris Jensen; Walt Scacchi (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
Large open source software development communities are quickly learning that, to be successful, they must integrate efforts not only among the organizations investing developers within the community and unaffiliated volunteer contributors, but also negotiate relationships with external groups hoping to sway the social and technical direction of the community and its products. Leadership and control sharing across organizations and individuals in and between communities are common sources of conflict. Such conflict often leads to breakdowns in collaboration. This paper seeks to explore the negotiation of these conflicts, collaborative efforts, and leadership and control structures in the Netbeans.org community.
Keywords: conflict; leadership; netbeans

The Collaborative Integrity of Open-Source Software - Greg R Vetter (2004)
This Article analyzes legal protection for open-source software by comparing it to the venerable civil law tradition of moral rights. The comparison focuses on the moral right of integrity, with which one may object to mutilations of her work, even after having parted with the copyright and the object that embodies the work. The parallel apparatus in open-source licensing is conditional permission to use a copyrighted work. The conditions include that source code be available and that software use be royalty-free. These conditions facilitate open-source collaborative software development. At the heart of both systems is the right for creators to control the view that a work presents. In the open-source system, this is the Collaborative Integrity of open-source software. The history and legacy of moral rights help us better understand Collaborative Integrity in open-source software. The right of integrity in some international jurisdictions may apply to software, thus raising questions whether it hurts or helps open-source software. Building from these insights, this Article evaluates whether the Collaborative Integrity in open-source software deserves protection as a separate right, just as the right of integrity developed separately from pecuniary copyright in civil law jurisdictions.

Communication and Conflict Issues in Collaborative Software Research Projects - Boldyreff, Cornelia; Nutter, David; Rank, Stephen (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
The Open Source Component Artefact Repository (OSCAR) was developed under the auspices of the GENESIS project to store data produced during the software development process. Significant problems were encountered during the course of the project in both the development itself and management of the project. The reasons for and potential solutions to these problems are examined with the intention of developing a set of guidelines to enable participants in other collaborative projects to avoid these pitfalls. We wish to make it clear that we attach no opprobrium to any of the participants in the GENESIS project as many of the issues we outline below have solutions only visible with hindsight. Instead, we seek to provide a fair-minded critique of our role and the mistakes we made in a fairly typical two-year EU research project, and to provide a set of recommendations for other similar projects, in order that they can (attempt to) avoid suffering similarly.
Keywords: artefact; cvs; genesis; oscar

Community structure of modules in the Apache project - Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona (2004)
The relationships among modules in a software project of a certain size can give us much information about its internal organization and a way to control and monitor development activities and evolution of large libre software projects. In this paper, we show how information available in CVS repositories can be used to study the structure of the modules in a project when they are related by the people working in them, and how techniques taken from the social networks fields can be used to highlight the characteristics of that structure. As a case example, we also show some results of applying this methodology to the Apache project in several points in time. Among other facts, it is shown how the project evolves and is self-structuring, with developer communities of modules corresponding to semantically related families of modules.

Community structure of modules in the Apache project - Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona; Luis Lopez; Gregorio Robles (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
The relationships among modules in a software project of a certain size can give us much information about its internal organization and a way to control and monitor development activities and evolution of large libre software projects. In this paper, we show how information available in CVS repositories can be used to study the structure of the modules in a project when they are related by the people working in them, and how techniques taken from the social networks fields can be used to highlight the characteristics of that structure. As a case example, we also show some results of applying this methodology to the Apache project in several points in time. Among other facts, it is shown how the project evolves and is self-structuring, with developer communities of modules corresponding to semantically related families of modules.
Keywords: apache; cvs; source code

A Comparative Study of Online User Communities Involvement In Product Innovation and Development - Tzu-Ying Chan (2004)
The literature lacks a conceptual understanding on how different types of online user communities can influence the product innovation and development. Therefore, this research attempts to understand this phenomenon by re-classifying the current online user communities from the perspective of product innovation and development and has resulted in five different models of user communities. We compare and discuss of the five models. Lastly, we will further discuss the deficiencies of the User Collaboration Innovation Communities, theoretically and practically, to suggest the feasibility of the research direction in the future.

A Conflict Detected Earlier is a Conflict Resolved Easier - Sarma, A.; van der Hoek, A. (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
Open Source development is highly distributed and parallel in nature. There are no definite boundaries, either for people or from where they work. This high level of parallel, distributed development leads to conflicting changes made concurrently by different developers. Be- cause OSS developers lack the kinds of informal coordination opportunities that collocation offers, OSS developers must rely on mailing lists, discussion groups, and tools such as CM and bug tracking systems to try to man- age their parallel efforts such that conflicts do not occur. Unfortunately, these coordination mechanisms are not adequate: it still regularly happens that parallel changes interfere, either via direct overlap or indirect, semantic conflicts. In this paper, we build upon our previous work in raising awareness as a mechanism to support better coordination among developers, and introduce a new integration of our Palantír tool with Eclipse as well as a new visualization of parallel work that we believe is especially useful in Open Source settings.

The contestation of code: A preliminary investigation into the discourse of the free/libre and open source movements - David M. Berry (2004)
This paper uses discourse analysis to examine the free/libre and open source movements. It analyses how they fix elements within the order of discourse of computer code production. It attempts to uncover the key signifiers in their discourses and trace linkages between the sedimented discourses of wider society. Using discourse theory and critical discourse analysis, the theoretical foundations underpinning each of the movements are critically examined and the effect on the wider developer and Internet community is discussed. Additionally, this paper seeks to recommend discursive strategies that could be employed to avoid the threat of colonization by neoliberal discourse and the consequent challenge this has for the ideas of freedom, liberty and community within the developer communities? own discourses.

Contrasting Community Building in Sponsored and Community Founded Open Source Projects - Joel West (2004)
Prior characterizations of open source projects have been based on the model of a community-founded project. More recently, a second model has emerged, where organizations spinout internally developed code to a public forum. Based on field work on open source projects, we compare the lifecycle differences between these two models. We identify problems unique to spinout projects, particularly in attracting and building an external community. We illustrate these issues with a feasibility analysis of a proposed open source project based on VistA, the primary healthcare information system of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. This example illuminates the complexities of building a community after a code base has been developed and suggests that open source software can be used to transfer technology to the private sector.

Contributing to OS Projects. A Comparison between Individual and Firms - Andrea Bonaccorsi; Cristina Rossi (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
This paper studies the contributions software firms make to Open Source (OS) projects. Our goal is to ascertain whether they follow the same regularity of pattern seen for individual programmer An exhaustive empirical analysis was carried out using data on project membership1 , project coordination and the contributions made by 146 Italian firms that do business with OS software. We compare our findings with the results of the surveys taken on OS programmers. The availability of the data gathered by Hertel et al. ([10]) on 141 developers of the Linux kernel allowed a direct comparison to be carried out between the two sets2 .
Keywords: Survey

Control Objectives in Open Source Projects - Ven, Kris; Verelst, Jan (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
Many studies on Open Source Software Development (OSSD) have been published in the past years. In these studies, OSSD has received positive comments and is proposed as a new way of developing software. We investigate how project management is used in Open Source Software (OSS) projects to exercise control of development activities. Project management in OSSD is worth studying, because research has shown that project management is a critical success factor in traditional software development. We use the COBIT framework to audit project management practices commonly found in OSS projects with the aim of determining which practices are currently missing or can be further improved upon. The framework identifies several potential threats to the long term continuity of OSS projects.
Keywords: cobit; project management

Coordination practices for bug fixing within FLOSS development teams - Kevin Crowston; Barbara Scozzi (1st International Workshop on Computer Supported Activity Coordination, 6th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 2004)
Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is primarily developed by distributed teams. Developers contribute from around the world and coordinate their activity almost exclusively by means of email and bulletin boards. FLOSS development teams some how profit from the advantages and evade the challenges of distributed software development. Despite the relevance of the FLOSS both for research and practice, few studies have investigated the work practices adopted by these development teams. In this paper we investigate the structure and the coordination practices adopted by development teams during the bug-fixing process, which is considered one of main areas of FLOSS project success. In particular, based on a codification of the messages recorded in the bug tracking system of four projects, we identify the accomplished tasks, the adopted coordination mechanisms, and the role undertaken by both the FLOSS development team and the FLOSS community. We conclude with suggestions for further research.
Keywords: activity; bug fixing; bug reports; bug tracker; coordination; downloads; dynapi; FLOSS; gaim; kicq; phpmyadmin; status

The critical delusion of the condition of digitisation - George Dafermos (2004)
This essay analyses how digital media prosthetics, institutionalisation (in particular the manifestations of copyright and patent law which lurk behind vested interests in controlling the transition to a vastly more powerful new world), and the imperatives of corporate planning have come into a conflict so fierce that shared lived experience, increasingly, is forced to undergo a rapid process of commodification. This struggle, which can no longer be defined through the lens of geography or class alone, in turn, points to a not too distant future in which commons-based peer production/consumption is exploited within the context of intense social taylorism and digital fordism with the ultimate goal to turn culture into a paid-for experience, and hence moving the terrain of struggle away from the surplus value of labour to the legitimacy of knowledge sharing and pervasive networking, and how the latter can be monetised and controlled in accordance with anarcho-capitalist agendas. Obviously, the question which we ought to pose to ourselves is how the revolutionary demands of hacking can be guided, assembled, and reproduced, so that this process of commodification is consciously resisted by technology developers and users alike, artists, and all those whose creativity and desire for socially conscious technological innovation and emergent social co-operation have been enhanced by the digital condition we're increasingly in the centre of.

Data Mining for Software Process Discovery in Open Source Software Development Communities - Chris Jensen; Walt Scacchi (Proc. Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, in conjunction with ICSE 2004, 2004)

Decoding the "Free/Open Source (F/OSS) Puzzle" - a Survey ofTheretical and Empirical Contributions - Maria Alessandra Rossi (2004)
F/OSS software has been described by many as a puzzle. In the past five years, it has stimulated the curiosity of scholars in a variety of fields, including economics, law, psychology, anthropology and computer science, so that the number of contributions on the subject has increased exponentially. The purpose of this paper is to provide a sufficiently comprehensive account of these contributions in order to draw some general conclusions on the state of our understanding of the phenomenon and identify directions for future research. The exercise suggests that what is puzzling about F/OSS is not so much the fact that people freely contribute to a good they make available to all, but rather the complexity of its institutional structure and its ability to organizationally evolve over time.

Do the Rich Get Richer? The Impact of Power Laws on Open Source Development Projects - Conklin, Megan (2004 Open Source Conference (OSCON), 2004)
Keywords: open source; power law; social network analysis; sourceforge

The Economics of Open Source Hijacking and Declining Quality of Digital Information Resources: A Case for Copyleft - Andrea Ciffolilli (2004)
The economics of information goods suggest the need of institutional intervention to address the problem of revenue extraction from investments in resources characterized by high fixed costs of production and low marginal costs of reproduction and distribution. Solutions to the appropriation issue, such as copyright, are supposed to guarantee an incentive for innovative activities at the price of few vices marring their rationale. In the case of digital information resources, apart from conventional inefficiencies, copyright shows an extra vice since it might be used perversely as a tool to hijack and privatise collectively provided open source and open content knowledge assemblages. Whilst the impact of hijacking on open source software development may be uncertain or uneven, some risks are clear in the case of open content works. The paper presents some evidence of malicious effects of hijacking in the Internet search market by discussing the case of The Open Directory Project. Furthermore, it calls for a wider use of novel institutional remedies such as copyleft and Creative Commons licensing, built upon the paradigm of copyright customisation.

The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond - Josh Lerner (2004)
This paper reviews our understanding of the growing open source movement. We highlight how many aspects of open source software appear initially puzzling to an economist. As we have acknowledge, our ability to answer confidently many of the issues raised here questions is likely to increase as the open source movement itself grows and evolves. At the same time, it is heartening to us how much of open source activities can be understood within existing economic frameworks, despite the presence of claims to the contrary. The labor and industrial organization literatures provide lenses through which the structure of open source projects, the role of contributors, and the movement's ongoing evolution can be viewed.

An empirical study of open-source and closed-source software products - Paulson, J. W.; Succi, G.; Eberlein, A. (Ieee Transactions on Software Engineering, 2004)
This paper describes an empirical study of open-source and closed-source software projects. The motivation for this research is to quantitatively investigate common perceptions about open-source projects, and to validate these perceptions through an empirical study. This paper investigates the hypothesis that open-source software grows more quickly, but does not find evidence to support this. The project growth is similar for all the projects in the analysis, indicating that other factors may limit growth. The hypothesis that creativity is more prevalent in open-source software is also examined, and evidence to support this hypothesis is found using the metric of functions added over time. The concept of open-source projects succeeding because of their simplicity is not supported by the analysis, nor is the hypothesis of open-source projects being more modular. However, the belief that defects are found and fixed more rapidly in open-source projects is supported by an analysis of the functions modified. The paper finds support for two of the five common beliefs and concludes that, when implementing or switching to the open-source development model, practitioners should ensure that an appropriate metrics Collection strategy is in place to verify the perceived benefits.

Epistemologically Multiple Actor-Centred System: or EMACS at Work! - Yu-wei Lin (2004)
This paper analyses the innovation process of EMACS (short for Editing MACroS) from a socio-technical perspective. I investigates how actors from different backgrounds contribute multiple ways of knowing, understanding and resolving problems that arise in the innovation process. The analysis of EMACS is especially useful since it spans the period that saw the origins of the free software movement and the subsequent development of a broader free/libre open source software (FLOSS) social world.

Executable source code and non-executable source code - Gregorio Robles (2004)
The concept of source code, understood as the source components used to obtain a binary, ready to execute version of a program, comprises currently more than source code written in a programming language. Specially when we move apart from systems-programming and enter the realm of end-user applications, we find source files with documentation, interface specifications, internationalization and localization modules, multimedia files, etc. All of them are source code in the sense that the developer works directly with them, and the application is built automatically using them as input. This paper discusses the relationship between 'classical' source code (usually written in a programming language) and these other files by analyzing a publicly-available software versioning repository. Aspects that have been studied include the nature of the software repository, the different mixtures of source code found in several software projects stored in it, the specialization of developers to the different tasks, etc.

An Experimental Study of Open Innovation using MASTERMIND - Benjamin Hak-Fung Chiao (2004)
This paper presents the first experimental results on open innovation, which is defined to be a method to solve problems with other people by revealing some or the complete history of algorithm already used. An important example is open source. Our data from human subjects show that non-modular payoff structure drives the convergence to a Nash equilibrium, in which commission price to helpers converge to zero but helpers will not stop solving problems for others. By non-modularity, we mean that the total production (or payoff) of a team is zero if either one of its members fails to produce at least at a certain level. In the experiment, subjects produce by solving a variant of a popular board game called MASTERMIND. Theoretically, free-riding leads to zero commission price. This removes a signaling function of price for the difficulty levels of work remaining. Empirically, however, it is not sufficient to cause the catastrophic outcome of zero payoff. This provides a basis for us to hypothesize that open innovation is a key explanation because it allows subjects to directly observe the history of work already done and potentially direct more resources to the more difficult tasks.

Exploiting the Collaboration between Open Source Developers and Research - Succi, G.; Zuliani, P. (Proceedings of the 4th ICSE Workshop on Open Source, 2004)
In this paper it is argued that open source developers and research projects carrying out user requirement analysis should collaborate at a closer level. In particular, we discuss how developers could take advantage of the knowledge generated by COSPA, a research project aimed at studying and supporting the introduction of open source software in the Public Administration. COSPA focuses on office automation and desktop system software and it could thus provide developers with user requirements from one of the main "corporate" users of software. To this aim, the project has established an "observer" status, by means of which interested parties may access COSPA's results, thereby fostering collaboration and increasing dissemination of knowledge.

Fostering cooperation on the Internet: social exchange processes in innovative virtual consumer communities - Andrea Hemetsberger (2004)
Virtual communities of consumers increasingly engage in voluntary collaborative production of digital goods and services which became highly successful in recent years. This paper offers a theoretical conceptualization and empirical evidence of the key elements and processes of exchange in those communities. Within a culture of gift-giving and generalized social exchange, knowledge as the main resource of the community is multiplied by giving it away freely to others and thus, fosters contribution behavior. Friendship, peer reputation and external feed-back provided by a global user community represent highly motivating social rewards which, combined with individual gain of knowledge, constitute a self-sustaining system of exchange.