Research friendly software repositories

What is the future of software evolution? In 1974, Meir M. Lehman had a vision of software evolution being driven by empirical studies of software repositories, and of a theory based on those empirical results. However, that scenario is yet to come. Software evolution studies are often based on a few cases, because the needed information is scarce, dispersed and incomplete. Their conclusions are not generalizable, slowing down the progress of this research discipline. Libre (free / open source) software supposes an opportunity to alleviate this situation. In this paper we describe the existing approaches to provide research datasets that are mining libre software repositories, and propose an agenda based on the concept of research friendly software repositories, which provides finer granularity and integrated data.