An empirical study of FOSS developers patterns of contribution: Challenges for data linkage and analysis

The majority of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developers are mobile and often use different identities in the projects or communities they participate in. These characteristics pose challenges for researchers studying the presence and contributions of developers across multiple repositories. In this paper, we present a methodology, employ various statistical measures, and leverage Bayesian networks to study the patterns of contribution of 502 developers in both Version Control System (VCS) and mailing list repositories in 20 GNOME projects. Our findings shows that only a small percentage of developers are contributing to both repositories and this cohort is making more commits than they are posting messages to mailing lists. The implications of these findings for understanding the patterns of contribution in FOSS projects and on the quality of the final product are discussed.     

A text categorisation tool for open source communities based on semantic analysis

Open source software (OSS) projects are supported by communities interacting through software repositories and mailing lists. Thousands of contributors participate in the development of the projects although they rarely meet each other. The result is a huge archived repository with thousands of questions, answers and contributions usually difficult to explore. We propose a tool based on semantic analysis for both performing an automatic knowledge discovery and a categorisation of the content of mailing lists repositories. Semantic analysis is a practical method for extracting and inferring relations of words in passages of discourse, producing measures of relations among words or passages that are well correlated with semantic similarity. The objective of this article is two-fold: (1) to develop a text categorisation tool based on indexing terms and semantic annotation, and (2) to apply the developed tool to extract the main dimensions related to knowledge sharing activities in virtual communities. Debian Linux ports to embedded processors are used as a case study to accomplish the proposed double objective.     

An empirically-based characterization and quantification of information seeking through mailing lists during Open Source developers’ software evolution

ContextSeveral authors have proposed information seeking as an appropriate perspective for studying software evolution. Empirical evidence in this area suggests that substantial time delays can accrue, due to the unavailability of required information, particularly when this information must travel across geographically distributed sites.ObjectiveAs a first step in addressing the time delays that can occur in information seeking for distributed Open Source (OS) programmers during software evolution, this research characterizes the information seeking of OS developers through their mailing lists.MethodA longitudinal study that analyses 17 years of developer mailing list activity in total, over 6 different OS projects is performed, identifying the prevalent information types sought by developers, from a qualitative, grounded analysis of this data. Quantitative analysis of the number-of-responses and response time-lag is also performed.ResultsThe analysis shows that Open Source developers are particularly implementation centric and team focused in their use of mailing lists, mirroring similar findings that have been reported in the literature. However novel findings include the suggestion that OS developers often require support regarding the technology they use during development, that they refer to documentation fairly frequently and that they seek implementation-oriented specifics based on system design principles that they anticipate in advance. In addition, response analysis suggests a large variability in the response rates for different types of questions, and particularly that participants have difficulty ascertaining information on other developer’s activities.ConclusionThe findings provide insights for those interested in supporting the information needs of OS developer communities: They suggest that the tools and techniques developed in support of co-located developers should be largely mirrored for these communities: that they should be implementation centric, and directed at illustrating “how” the system achieves its functional goals and states. Likewise they should be directed at determining the reason for system bugs: a type of question frequently posed by OS developers but less frequently responded to.     

Identifying exogenous drivers and evolutionary stages in FLOSS projects

The success of a Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) project has been evaluated in the past through the number of commits made to its configuration management system, number of developers and number of users. Most studies, based on a popular FLOSS repository (SourceForge), have concluded that the vast majority of projects are failures.This study’s empirical results confirm and expand conclusions from an earlier and more limited work. Not only do projects from different repositories display different process and product characteristics, but a more general pattern can be observed. Projects may be considered as early inceptors in highly visible repositories, or as established projects within desktop-wide projects, or finally as structured parts of FLOSS distributions. These three possibilities are formalized into a framework of transitions between repositories.The framework developed here provides a wider context in which results from FLOSS repository mining can be more effectively presented. Researchers can draw different conclusions based on the overall characteristics studied about an Open Source software project’s potential for success, depending on the repository that they mine. These results also provide guidance to OSS developers when choosing where to host their project and how to distribute it to maximize its evolutionary success.     

Virtual communities as a resource for the development of OSS projects: the case of Linux ports to embedded processors

Open source software (OSS) projects represent a new paradigm of software creation and development based on hundreds or even thousands of developers and users organised in the form of a virtual community. The success of an OSS project is closely linked to the successful organisation and development of the virtual community of support. The main objective of this article is to analyse the activity of virtual communities. Social network analysis is employed to analyse Linux ports to embedded processors as a case study to achieve this aim. The obtained results confirm the necessity of structuring the virtual community with a selection of active developers and core members to promote community activity and attract peripheral users, expanding the impact of the underlying software. The obtained result will be useful for the software industry migrating to the open source software paradigm.     

Socialization in an Open Source Software Community: A Socio-Technical Analysis

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.     

Microsoft,Open Source and the software ecosystem: of predators and prey—the leopard can change its spots

Over the past few years, Microsoft has promoted a project called ‘Shared Source Initiative’, which allows certain customers (e.g., research institutions and independent software vendors) access to its source code on a restricted basis. As part of this initiative, Microsoft introduced some licences that appear to give unrestricted access to source code and closely resemble ‘traditional’ Open Source licences. In July 2007, two of these ‘shared source’ licenses (the Microsoft Community Licence and the Microsoft Permissive Licence) were submitted to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and subsequently approved by the OSI as certified Open Source licences. Thus Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative and its partial embrace of Open Source appear to be a significant step towards closing the ideological rift between developers of proprietary software and the Free/Open Source software movement, and more than just another attempt to appease consumers and/or critics in terms of software transparency. By analysing the ‘evolution’ of Microsoft's Shared Source licences, this article aims to shed some light on the question what is needed for a ‘predator’ (i.e., proprietary, software developer) such as Microsoft to become ‘prey’ (i.e., be part of the Open Source community). This article concludes that, although Microsoft's efforts are to be lauded, it is highly unlikely that the company will embrace fully the Open Source philosophy in the near future.     

A Methodological Framework for Socio-Cognitive Analyses of Collaborative Design of Open Source Software

Open Source Software (OSS) development challenges traditional software engineering practices. In particular, OSS projects are managed by a large number of volunteers, working freely on the tasks they choose to undertake. OSS projects also rarely rely on explicit system-level design, or on project plans or schedules. Moreover, OSS developers work in arbitrary locations and collaborate almost exclusively over the Internet, using simple tools such as email and software code tracking databases (e.g. CVS).All the characteristics above make OSS development akin to weaving a tapestry of heterogeneous components. The OSS design process relies on various types of actors: people with prescribed roles, but also elements coming from a variety of information spaces (such as email and software code). The objective of our research is to understand the specific hybrid weaving accomplished by the actors of this distributed, collective design process. This, in turn, challenges traditional methodologies used to understand distributed software engineering: OSS development is simply too “fibrous” to lend itself well to analysis under a single methodological lens.In this paper, we describe the methodological framework we articulated to analyze collaborative design in the Open Source world. Our framework focuses on the links between the heterogeneous components of a project’s hybrid network. We combine ethnography, text mining, and socio-technical network analysis and visualization to understand OSS development in its totality. This way, we are able to simultaneously consider the social, technical, and cognitive aspects of OSS development. We describe our methodology in detail, and discuss its implications for future research on distributed collective practices.The order of the co-authors names is not significant.     

Characteristics of Open Source Software Projects for the General Population: Reciprocity and Network Effects

In this paper, we conceptualize about, and empirically test for, differences between the more traditional Open Source Software (OSS) projects that are aimed towards techies-only and the projects that are aimed towards the general population. By drawing upon the theories of Reciprocity and Network Effects, we propose that OSS projects for techies-only are more likely to exhibit characteristics that are explained by balanced reciprocity, whereas OSS projects for the general population are more likely to show characteristics that are rooted in generalized reciprocity. In addition, we propose that local network effects can be used to explain certain characteristics of OSS projects for techies-only, whereas direct and indirect network effects shape the corresponding characteristics of OSS projects for the general population differently. The findings support our hypotheses and lead us to recommend actions for OSS projects targeted towards the general population, as well as suggestions for future research.     

The search for a research method for studying OSS process innovation

Medium-sized, open-participation Open Source Software (OSS) projects do not usually perform explicit software process improvement on any routine basis. It would be useful to understand how to get such a project to accept a process improvement proposal and hence to perform process innovation. We want to determine an effective and feasible qualitative research method for studying the above question. We present (narratively) a case study of how we worked towards and eventually found such a research method. The case involves four attempts at collecting suitable data about innovation episodes (direct participation (twice), polling developers for episodes, manually finding episodes in mailing list archives) and the adaptation of the Grounded Theory data analysis methodology. Direct participation allows gathering rather rich data, but does not allow for observing a sufficiently large number of innovation episodes. Polling developers for episodes did not prove to be useful. Using mailing list archives to find data to be analyzed is both feasible and effective. We also describe how the data thus found can be analyzed based on the Grounded Theory Method with suitable adjustments. By-and-large, our findings ought to apply to studying various phenomena in OSS development processes that are similarly heavyweight and infrequent. However, specific details may block this possibility and we cannot predict which details that might be. The amount of effort involved in direct participation approaches to qualitative research can easily be underestimated. Also, survey approaches are not well-suited for many process issues in OSS, because too few developers are sufficiently process-conscious. An approach based on passive observation is a viable alternative in the OSS context due to the availability of large amounts of fairly complete archival data.