Copyright - © Emerald Publishing Limited 2017
N1 -Copyright - © Emerald Publishing Limited 2017
N1 -Copyright - © Emerald Publishing Limited 2017
N1 -Copyright - © Emerald Publishing Limited 2017
N1 -Last updated - 2024-12-04
N1 -Last updated - 2024-12-04
N1 -Last updated - 2024-12-04
N1 -Last updated - 2024-12-04
KW - Science KW - Open source software KW - Collaboration KW - Linux KW - Leadership KW - Business And Economics--Management KW - Participation KW - Open-source software KW - Interviews KW - Qualitative research KW - Public domain KW - Strategic management KW - Freeware KW - Collaborative KW - Reputations ER - TY - JOUR TI - Changes in free and open source software licenses: managerial interventions and variations on project attractiveness AU - Santos, Carlos Denner D60os T2 - Journal of Internet Services and Applications AB - The license adopted by an open source software is associated with its success in terms of attractiveness and maintenance of an active ecosystem of users, bug reporters, developers, and sponsors because what can and cannot be done with the software and its derivatives in terms of improvement and market distribution depends on legal terms there specified. By knowing this licensing effect through scientific publications and their experience, project managers became able to act strategically, loosening up the restrictions associated with their source code due to sponsor interests, for example; or the contrary, tightening restrictions up to guarantee source code openness, adhering to the “forever free” strategy. But, have project managers behaved strategically like that, changing their projects license? Up to this paper, we did not know if and what types of changes in these legal allowances project managers have made and, more importantly, whether such managerial interventions are associated with variations in intervened project attractiveness (i.e., related to their numbers of web hits, downloads and members). This paper accomplishes these two goals and demonstrates that: 1) managers of free and open source software projects do change the distribution rights of their source code through a change in the (group of) license(s) adopted; and 2) variations in attractiveness are associated with the strategic choice of a licensing schema. To reach these conclusions, a unique dataset of open source projects that have changed license was assembled in a comparative form, analyzing intervened projects over its monthly periods of different licenses. Based on a sample of more than 3500 active projects over 44 months obtained from the FLOSSmole repository of Sourceforge.net data, 756 projects that had changed their source code distribution allowances and restrictions were identified and analyzed. A dataset on these projects’ type of changes was assembled to enable a descriptive and exploratory analysis of the types of license interventions observed over a period of almost four years anchored on projects’ attractiveness. More than 35 types of interventions were detected. The results indicate that variations in attractiveness after a license intervention are not symmetric; that is, if a change from license schema A to B is beneficial to attractiveness, a change from B to A is not necessarily prejudicial. This and other interesting findings are discussed in detail. In general, the results here reported support the current literature knowledge that the restrictions imposed by the license on the source code distribution are associated with market success vis-a-vis project attractiveness, but they also suggest that the state-of-the-science is superficial in terms of what is known about why these differences in attractiveness can be observed. The complexity of the results indicates to free software managers that no licensing schema should be seen as the right one, and its choice should be carefully made, considering project strategic goals as perceived relevant to stakeholders of the application and its production. These conclusions create awareness of several limitations of our current knowledge, which are discussed along with guidelines to understand them deeper in future research endeavors. © 2017, The Author(s). DA - 2017/// PY - 2017 DO - 10.1186/s13174-017-0062-3 VL - 8 IS - 1 UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85026914900&doi=10.1186%2fs13174-017-0062-3&partnerID=40&md5=c3fd4143f92d300f015897b772a8efed L1 - https://jisajournal.springeropen.com/counter/pdf/10.1186/s13174-017-0062-3 N1 -Cited by: 6; All Open Access, Gold Open Access
N1 -Cited by: 6; All Open Access, Gold Open Access
KW - Governance KW - Open source software KW - Open source KW - Free software KW - Information technology KW - Software license KW - Intellectual property KW - GPL KW - Attractiveness KW - Project and people management KW - Software project ER - TY - CONF TI - An Exploratory Mixed-methods Study on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance in Open-Source Software AU - Franke, Lucas AU - Liang, Huayu AU - Farzanehpour, Sahar AU - Brantly, Aaron AU - Davis, James C. AU - Brown, Chris T3 - ESEM '24 AB - Background: Governments worldwide are considering data privacy regulations. These laws, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), require software developers to meet privacy-related requirements when interacting with users’ data. Prior research describes the impact of such laws on software development, but only for commercial software. Although open-source software is commonly integrated into regulated software, and thus must be engineered or adapted for compliance, we do not know how such laws impact open-source software development. Aims: To understand how data privacy laws affect open-source software (OSS) development, we focus on the European Union’s GDPR, as it is the most prominent such law. We investigated how GDPR compliance activities influence OSS developer activity (RQ1), how OSS developers perceive fulfilling GDPR requirements (RQ2), the most challenging GDPR requirements to implement (RQ3), and how OSS developers assess GDPR compliance (RQ4). Method: We distributed an online survey to explore perceptions of GDPR implementations from open-source developers (N=56). To augment this analysis, we further conducted a repository mining study to analyze development metrics on pull requests (N=31,462) submitted to open-source GitHub repositories. Results: Our results suggest GDPR policies complicate OSS development and introduce challenges, primarily regarding the management of users’ data, implementation costs and time, and assessments of compliance. Moreover, we observed negative perceptions of the GDPR from OSS developers and significant increases in development activity, in particular metrics related to coding and reviewing, on GitHub pull requests related to GDPR compliance. Conclusions: Our findings provide future research directions and implications for improving data privacy policies, motivating the need for relevant resources and automated tools to support data privacy regulation implementation and compliance efforts in OSS. C1 - New York, NY, USA C3 - Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement DA - 2024/// PY - 2024 DO - 10.1145/3674805.3686692 SP - 325 EP - 336 PB - Association for Computing Machinery SN - 979-8-4007-1047-6 UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3674805.3686692 L1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.14724 KW - Open-Source Software KW - Data Privacy KW - Regulatory Compliance ER - TY - JOUR TI - "Nip it in the Bud": Moderation Strategies in Open Source Software Projects and the Role of Bots AU - Hsieh, Jane AU - Kim, Joselyn AU - Dabbish, Laura AU - Zhu, Haiyi T2 - Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. AB - Much of our modern digital infrastructure relies critically upon open sourced software. The communities responsible for building this cyberinfrastructure require maintenance and moderation, which is often supported by volunteer efforts. Moderation, as a non-technical form of labor, is a necessary but often overlooked task that maintainers undertake to sustain the community around an OSS project. This study examines the various structures and norms that support community moderation, describes the strategies moderators use to mitigate conflicts, and assesses how bots can play a role in assisting these processes. We interviewed 14 practitioners to uncover existing moderation practices and ways that automation can provide assistance. Our main contributions include a characterization of moderated content in OSS projects, moderation techniques, as well as perceptions of and recommendations for improving the automation of moderation tasks. We hope that these findings will inform the implementation of more effective moderation practices in open source communities. DA - 2023/10// PY - 2023 DO - 10.1145/3610092 VL - 7 IS - CSCW2 UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3610092 L1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.07427 KW - open source KW - coordination KW - moderation KW - automation ER - TY - CONF TI - License Update and Migration Processes in Open Source Software Projects AU - Jensen, Chris AU - Scacchi, Walt A2 - Hissam, SA A2 - Russo, B A2 - Neto, MGD A2 - Kon, F T3 - IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology AB - Open source software (OSS) has increasingly been the subject of research efforts. Central to this focus is the nature under which the software can be distributed, used, and modified and the causes and consequent effects on software development, usage, and distribution. At present, we have little understanding of, what happens when these licenses change, what motivates such changes, and how new licenses are created, updated, and deployed. Similarly, little attention has been paid to the agreements under which contributions are made to OSS projects and the impacts of changes to these agreements. We might also ask these same questions regarding the licenses governing how individuals and groups contribute to OSS projects. This paper focuses on addressing these questions with case studies of processes by which the Apache Software Foundation's creation and migration to Version 2.0 of the Apache Software License and the NetBeans project's migration to the Joint Licensing Agreement. C3 - OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS: GROUNDING RESEARCH DA - 2011/// PY - 2011 DO - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24418-6_12 VL - 365 SP - 177 EP - 195 PB - CAPES, Minist Educ, Coordinat Improvement Higher Educ Personnel; CNPQ, Minist Sci & Tecnol, Natl Council Sci & Technol Dev; FAPESB, State Bahia Res Agcy; Petrobras, Brazilian Natl Energy Co SN - 978-3-642-24418-6 N1 -7th International Conference on Open Source Systems, Salvador, BRAZIL, OCT 05-08, 2011
ER - TY - JOUR TI - Managing Episodic Volunteers in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Communities AU - Barcomb, Ann AU - Klaas-Jan Stol AU - Fitzgerald, Brian AU - Riehle, Dirk T2 - IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering AB - We draw on the concept of episodic volunteering (EV) from the general volunteering literature to identify practices for managing EV in free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) communities. Infrequent but ongoing participation is widespread, but the practices that community managers are using to manage EV, and their concerns about EV, have not been previously documented. We conducted a policy Delphi study involving 24 FLOSS community managers from 22 different communities. Our panel identified 16 concerns related to managing EV in FLOSS, which we ranked by prevalence. We also describe 65 practices for managing EV in FLOSS. Almost three-quarters of these practices are used by at least three community managers. We report these practices using a systematic presentation that includes context, relationships between practices, and concerns that they address. These findings provide a coherent framework that can help FLOSS community managers to better manage episodic contributors. DA - 2022/// PY - 2022 DO - 10.1109/TSE.2020.2985093 VL - 48 IS - 1 SP - 260 EP - 277 LA - English SN - 00985589 UR - http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/managing-episodic-volunteers-free-libre-open/docview/2619023652/se-2?accountid=12861 AN - 2619023652 DB - ABI/INFORM Global L2 - https://libkey.io/libraries/72/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/ProQuest&rft_val_fmt=journal&rft.genre=article&rft.jtitle=IEEE+Transactions+on+Software+Engineering&rft.atitle=Managing+Episodic+Volunteers+in+Free%2FLibre%2FOpen+Source+Software+Communities&rft.au=Barcomb%2C+Ann%3BKlaas-Jan+Stol%3BFitzgerald%2C+Brian%3BRiehle%2C+Dirk.&rft.aulast=Barcomb&rft.aufirst=Ann&rft.date=2022-01-01&rft.volume=48&rft.issue=1&rft.spage=260&rft.isbn=&rft.btitle=&rft.title=IEEE+Transactions+on+Software+Engineering&rft.issn=00985589&rft_id=info:doi/10.1109%2FTSE.2020.2985093 N1 -Copyright - Copyright IEEE Computer Society 2022
N1 -Last updated - 2023-11-24
KW - open source software KW - Open source software KW - Sustainable development KW - Organizations KW - Software KW - Computer bugs KW - Open source KW - community management KW - free software KW - Object recognition KW - Community management KW - Systematics KW - Open-source software KW - Best practices KW - Public domain KW - Computers--Software KW - Freeware KW - Lenses KW - Community participation KW - episodic volunteering KW - Volunteering KW - Freemasonry ER - TY - CONF TI - What to Expect from Code Review Bots on GitHub? A Survey with OSS Maintainers AU - Wessel, Mairieli AU - Serebrenik, Alexander AU - Wiese, Igor AU - Steinmacher, Igor AU - Gerosa, Marco A. T3 - SBES '20 AB - Software bots are used by Open Source Software (OSS) projects to streamline the code review process. Interfacing between developers and automated services, code review bots report continuous integration failures, code quality checks, and code coverage. However, the impact of such bots on maintenance tasks is still neglected. In this paper, we study how project maintainers experience code review bots. We surveyed 127 maintainers and asked about their expectations and perception of changes incurred by code review bots. Our findings reveal that the most frequent expectations include enhancing the feedback bots provide to developers, reducing the maintenance burden for developers, and enforcing code coverage. While maintainers report that bots satisfied their expectations, they also perceived unexpected effects, such as communication noise and newcomers' dropout. Based on these results, we provide a series of implications for bot developers, as well as insights for future research. C1 - New York, NY, USA C3 - Proceedings of the XXXIV Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering DA - 2020/12/21/ PY - 2020 DO - 10.1145/3422392.3422459 DP - ACM Digital Library SP - 457 EP - 462 PB - Association for Computing Machinery SN - 978-1-4503-8753-8 ST - What to Expect from Code Review Bots on GitHub? UR - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3422392.3422459 Y2 - 2025/03/26/ L1 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3422392.3422459 N1 -34th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES), ELECTR NETWORK, OCT 21-23, 2020
KW - open source software KW - code review KW - software bots KW - pull-based model ER - TY - JOUR TI - Code Reuse in Open Source Software Development: Quantitative Evidence, Drivers, and Impediments AU - Sojer, Manuel AU - Henkel, Joachim AB - The focus of existing open source software (OSS) research has been on how and why individuals and firms add to the commons of public OSS code - that is, on the “giving” side of this open innovation process. In contrast, research on the corresponding “receiving” side of the innovation process is scarce. We address this gap, studying how existing OSS code is reused and serves as an input to further OSS development. Our findings are based on a survey with 686 responses from OSS developers. As the most interesting results, our multivariate analyses of developers’ code reuse behavior point out that developers with larger personal networks within the OSS community and those who have experience in a greater number of OSS projects reuse more, presumably because both network size and a broad project experience facilitate local search for reusable artifacts. Moreover, we find that a development paradigm that calls for releasing an initial functioning version of the software early - as the “credible promise” in OSS - leads to increased reuse. Finally, we identify developers’ interest to tackle difficult technical challenges as detrimental to efficient reuse-based innovation. Beyond OSS, we discuss the relevance of our findings for companies developing software and for the receiving side of open innovation processes in general. DA - 2010/03/09/ PY - 2010 DO - 10.17705/1jais.00248 DP - papers.ssrn.com LA - en ST - Code Reuse in Open Source Software Development UR - https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1489789 Y2 - 2025/03/26/20:05:28 L1 - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1594695_code1171482.pdf?abstractid=1489789&mirid=1 KW - Code Reuse KW - Innovation KW - Open Source Software KW - Software Development ER - TY - JOUR TI - "They Can Only Ever Guide": How an Open Source Software Community Uses Roadmaps to Coordinate Effort AU - Klug, Daniel AU - Bogart, Christopher AU - Herbsleb, James D. T2 - Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. AB - Unlike in commercial software development, open source software (OSS) projects do not generally have managers with direct control over how developers spend their time, yet for projects with large, diverse sets of contributors, the need exists to focus and steer development in a particular direction in a coordinated way. This is especially important for "infrastructure" projects, such as critical libraries and programming languages that many other people depend on. Some projects have taken the approach of borrowing planning tools that originated in commercial development, despite the fact that these techniques were designed for very different contexts, e.g. strong top-down control and profit motives. Little research has been done to understand how these practices are adapted to a new context. In this paper, we examine the Rust project's use of roadmaps: how has an important OSS infrastructure project adapted an inherently top-down tool to the freewheeling world of OSS? We find that because Rust's roadmaps are built in part by summarizing what motivated developers most prefer to work on, they are in some ways more a description of the motivated labor available than they are a directive that the community move in a particular direction. They allow the community to avoid wasting time on unpopular proposals by revealing that there will be little help in building them, and encouraging work on popular features by making visible the amount of consensus in those features. Roadmaps generate a collective focus without limiting the full scope of what developers work on: roadmap issues consume proportionally more effort than other issues, but constitute a minority of the work done (i.e issues and pull requests made) by both central and peripheral participants. They also create transparency among and beyond the community into what central contributors' plans are, and allow more rational decision-making by providing a way for evidence about community needs to be linked to decision-making. DA - 2021/04/22/ PY - 2021 DO - 10.1145/3449232 DP - ACM Digital Library VL - 5 IS - CSCW1 SP - 158:1 EP - 158:28 ST - "They Can Only Ever Guide" UR - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449232 Y2 - 2025/03/26/15:44:56 L1 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3449232 KW - collaboration KW - open source KW - common pool resources KW - rust language ER - TY - JOUR TI - The impacts of lockdown on open source software contributions during the COVID-19 pandemic AU - Hu, Jin AU - Hu, Daning AU - Yang, Xuan AU - Chau, Michael T2 - RESEARCH POLICY AB - The COVID-19 pandemic instigated widespread lockdowns, compelling millions to transition to work-from-home (WFH) arrangements and rely heavily on computer-mediated communications (CMC) for collaboration. This study examines the impacts of lockdown on innovation-driven work productivity, focusing on contributions to open source software (OSS) projects on GitHub, the world's largest OSS platform. By leveraging two lockdowns in China as natural experiments, we discover that developers in the 2021 Xi'an lockdown increased OSS contributions by 9.0 %, while those in the 2020 Wuhan lockdown reduced their contributions by 10.5 %. A subsequent survey study elucidates this divergence, uncovering an adaptation effect wherein Xi'an developers became more accustomed to the new norm of WFH over time, capitalizing on the flexibility and opportunities of remote work. Moreover, our findings across both lockdowns reveal that the lack of face-to-face (F2F) interactions significantly impeded OSS contributions, whereas the increased available time at home positively influenced them. This finding is especially noteworthy as it challenges the assumption that CMC can effortlessly substitute for F2F interactions without negatively affecting productivity. We further examine the impacts of stay-at-home orders in the United States (US) on OSS contributions and find no significant effects. Collectively, our research offers valuable insights into the multifaceted impacts of lockdown on productivity, shedding light on how individuals adapt to remote work norms during protracted disruptions like a pandemic. These insights provide various stakeholders, including individuals, organizations, and policymakers, with vital knowledge to prepare for future disruptions, foster sustainable resilience, and adeptly navigate the evolving landscape of remote work in a postpandemic world. DA - 2023/12// PY - 2023 DO - 10.1016/j.respol.2023.104885 VL - 52 IS - 10 LA - English SN - 0048-7333 L2 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733323001695 KW - Open source software KW - COVID-19 KW - Face-to-face interactions KW - Lockdown KW - Work productivity ER - TY - JOUR TI - Maintaining interoperability in open source software: A case study of the Apache PDFBox project AU - Butler, Simon AU - Gamalielsson, Jonas AU - Lundell, Bjorn AU - Brax, Christoffer AU - Mattsson, Anders AU - Gustaysson, Tomas AU - Feist, Jonas AU - Lonroth, Erik T2 - JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE AB - Software interoperability is commonly achieved through the implementation of standards for communication protocols or data representation formats. Standards documents are often complex, difficult to interpret, and may contain errors and inconsistencies, which can lead to differing interpretations and implementations that inhibit interoperability. Through a case study of two years of activity in the Apache PDFBox project we examine day-to-day decisions made concerning implementation of the PDF specifications and standards in a community open source software (OSS) project. Thematic analysis is used to identify semantic themes describing the context of observed decisions concerning interoperability. Fundamental decision types are identified including emulation of the behaviour of dominant implementations and the extent to which to implement the PDF standards. Many factors influencing the decisions are related to the sustainability of the project itself, while other influences result from decisions made by external actors, including the developers of dependencies of PDFBox. This article contributes a fine grained perspective of decision-making about software interoperability by contributors to a community OSS project. The study identifies how decisions made support the continuing technical relevance of the software, and factors that motivate and constrain project activity. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) DA - 2020/01// PY - 2020 DO - 10.1016/j.jss.2019.110452 VL - 159 LA - English SN - 0164-1212 L1 - https://his.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1370325/FULLTEXT02 KW - Standards KW - Portable document format KW - Community open source software KW - Software implementation KW - Software interoperability ER - TY - JOUR TI - An empirical study of integration activities in distributions of open source software AU - Adams, Bram AU - Kavanagh, Ryan AU - Hassan, Ahmed E. AU - German, Daniel M. T2 - EMPIRICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AB - Reuse of software components, either closed or open source, is considered to be one of the most important best practices in software engineering, since it reduces development cost and improves software quality. However, since reused components are (by definition) generic, they need to be customized and integrated into a specific system before they can be useful. Since this integration is system-specific, the integration effort is non-negligible and increases maintenance costs, especially if more than one component needs to be integrated. This paper performs an empirical study of multi-component integration in the context of three successful open source distributions (Debian, Ubuntu and FreeBSD). Such distributions integrate thousands of open source components with an operating system kernel to deliver a coherent software product to millions of users worldwide. We empirically identified seven major integration activities performed by the maintainers of these distributions, documented how these activities are being performed by the maintainers, then evaluated and refined the identified activities with input from six maintainers of the three studied distributions. The documented activities provide a common vocabulary for component integration in open source distributions and outline a roadmap for future research on software integration. DA - 2016/06// PY - 2016 DO - 10.1007/s10664-015-9371-y VL - 21 IS - 3 SP - 960 EP - 1001 LA - English SN - 1382-3256 L1 - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10664-015-9371-y.pdf KW - Debian KW - Software reuse KW - Open source distributions KW - Software integration KW - Ubuntu and FreeBSD ER - TY - CONF TI - Core-Periphery Communication and the Success of Free/Libre Open Source Software Projects AU - Crowston, Kevin AU - Shamshurin, Ivan A2 - Crowston, K A2 - Hammouda, I A2 - Lundell, B A2 - Robles, G A2 - Gamalielsson, J A2 - Lindman, J T3 - IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology AB - We examine the relationship between communications by core and peripheral members and Free/Libre Open Source Software project success. The study uses data from 74 projects in the Apache Software Foundation Incubator. We conceptualize project success in terms of success building a community, as assessed by graduation from the Incubator. We compare successful and unsuccessful projects on volume of communication by core (committer) and peripheral community members and on use of inclusive pronouns as an indication of efforts to create intimacy among team members. An innovation of the paper is that use of inclusive pronouns is measured using natural language processing techniques. We find that core and peripheral members differ in their volume of contribution and in their use of inclusive pronouns, and that volume of communication is related to project success. C1 - HEIDELBERGER PLATZ 3, D-14197 BERLIN, GERMANY C3 - OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS: INTEGRATING COMMUNITIES, OSS 2016 DA - 2016/// PY - 2016 DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-39225-7_4 VL - 472 SP - 45 EP - 56 LA - English PB - SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN SN - 978-3-319-39225-7 978-3-319-39224-0 L1 - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-319-39225-7_4.pdf N1 -12th IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS), Gothenburg, SWEDEN, MAY 30-JUN 02, 2016
ER - TY - JOUR TI - The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects AU - Geiger, R. Stuart AU - Howard, Dorothy AU - Irani, Lilly T2 - Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. AB - Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly. DA - 2021/04// PY - 2021 DO - 10.1145/3449249 VL - 5 IS - CSCW1 UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3449249 L1 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3449249 KW - infrastructure KW - open source KW - free software KW - labor KW - maintenance ER - TY - JOUR TI - Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks AU - Yin, Likang AU - Chakraborti, Mahasweta AU - Yan, Yibo AU - Schweik, Charles AU - Frey, Seth AU - Filkov, Vladimir T2 - Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. AB - Sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) forms much of the fabric of our digital society, especially successful and sustainable ones. But many OSS projects do not become sustainable, resulting in abandonment and even risks for the world's digital infrastructure. Prior work has looked at the reasons for this mainly from two very different perspectives. In software engineering, the focus has been on understanding success and sustainability from the socio-technical perspective: the OSS programmers' day-to-day activities and the artifacts they create. In institutional analysis, on the other hand, emphasis has been on institutional designs (e.g., policies, rules, and norms) that structure project governance. Even though each is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of OSS projects, the connection and interaction between the two approaches have been barely explored.In this paper, we make the first effort toward understanding OSS project sustainability using a dual-view analysis, by combining institutional analysis with socio-technical systems analysis. In particular, we (i) use linguistic approaches to extract institutional rules and norms from OSS contributors' communications to represent the evolution of their governance systems, and (ii) construct socio-technical networks based on longitudinal collaboration records to represent each project's organizational structure. We combined the two methods and applied them to a dataset of developer digital traces from 253 nascent OSS projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator. We find that the socio-technical and institutional features relate to each other, and provide complimentary views into the progress of the ASF's OSS projects. Refining these combined analyses can help provide a more precise understanding of the synchronization between the evolution of institutional governance and organizational structure. DA - 2022/11// PY - 2022 DO - 10.1145/3555129 VL - 6 IS - CSCW2 UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3555129 L1 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3555129 N1 -80% of things are abandoned
CODEN - JSSODM
N1 -Copyright - Copyright Elsevier Sequoia S.A. Mar 2014
N1 -Last updated - 2024-12-02
KW - 5240:Software & systems KW - 9130:Experiment/theoretical treatment KW - Community evolution KW - Computers--Software KW - Fork KW - Open source KW - Open source software KW - Open Source software KW - Open-source software KW - Public domain KW - Software KW - Software Projects KW - Studies KW - Sustainability ER - TY - JOUR TI - When and How to Make Breaking Changes: Policies and Practices in 18 Open Source Software Ecosystems AU - Bogart, Chris AU - Kästner, Christian AU - Herbsleb, James AU - Thung, Ferdian T2 - ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. AB - Open source software projects often rely on package management systems that help projects discover, incorporate, and maintain dependencies on other packages, maintained by other people. Such systems save a great deal of effort over ad hoc ways of advertising, packaging, and transmitting useful libraries, but coordination among project teams is still needed when one package makes a breaking change affecting other packages. Ecosystems differ in their approaches to breaking changes, and there is no general theory to explain the relationships between features, behavioral norms, ecosystem outcomes, and motivating values. We address this through two empirical studies. In an interview case study, we contrast Eclipse, NPM, and CRAN, demonstrating that these different norms for coordination of breaking changes shift the costs of using and maintaining the software among stakeholders, appropriate to each ecosystem’s mission. In a second study, we combine a survey, repository mining, and document analysis to broaden and systematize these observations across 18 ecosystems. We find that all ecosystems share values such as stability and compatibility, but differ in other values. Ecosystems’ practices often support their espoused values, but in surprisingly diverse ways. The data provides counterevidence against easy generalizations about why ecosystem communities do what they do. DA - 2021/07// PY - 2021 DO - 10.1145/3447245 VL - 30 IS - 4 SN - 1049-331X UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3447245 KW - collaboration KW - Software ecosystems KW - qualitative research KW - dependency management KW - semantic versioning ER - TY - JOUR TI - Beyond Dependencies: The Role of Copy-Based Reuse in Open Source Software Development AU - Jahanshahi, Mahmoud AU - Reid, David AU - Mockus, Audris T2 - ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. AB - In Open Source Software, resources of any project are open for reuse by introducing dependencies or copying the resource itself. In contrast to dependency-based reuse, the infrastructure to systematically support copy-based reuse appears to be entirely missing. Our aim is to enable future research and tool development to increase efficiency and reduce the risks of copy-based reuse. We seek a better understanding of such reuse by measuring its prevalence and identifying factors affecting the propensity to reuse. To identify reused artifacts and trace their origins, our method exploits World of Code infrastructure. We begin with a set of theory-derived factors related to the propensity to reuse, sample instances of different reuse types, and survey developers to better understand their intentions. Our results indicate that copy-based reuse is common, with many developers being aware of it when writing code. The propensity for a file to be reused varies greatly among languages and between source code and binary files, consistently decreasing over time. Files introduced by popular projects are more likely to be reused, but at least half of reused resources originate from “small” and “medium” projects. Developers had various reasons for reuse but were generally positive about using a package manager. DA - 2025/01// PY - 2025 DO - 10.1145/3715907 SN - 1049-331X UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3715907 N1 -Just Accepted
KW - Open Source Software KW - Software Development KW - Copy-based Reuse KW - Reuse KW - Software Supply Chain KW - World of Code ER -