Assessing FLOSS Communities: An Experience Report from the QualOSS Project

In recent years, a very important structural change in the software industry took place, with an increasing number of firms that got involved in Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development communities. FLOSS communities and products have been studied as complementary to proprietary software companies and products. In this paper we propone a business model for the software market, and in particular we analyze the competition between proprietary software firms and FLOSS firms. Our software market is a system where each agent is independent of each other in the choice about buying or selling software products or services. The proposed work aims to analyze the influence of FLOSS firms producing both software and services in vertical software markets, nowadays mostly dominated by large proprietary firms. The findings show that FLOSS firms are able to compete with proprietary firms, though in the end a monopoly or oligopoly of the latters emerges. The ousted FLOSS firms, however, survive longer than proprietary ones, when these are not able to compete in the market.

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development has proven itself over the years to be able to deliver high-quality software products. However, it is not clear how quality emerges from the large amount of loosely organised activities of a FLOSS community. This makes it difficult to apply traditional quality metrics and certification processes to FLOSS products. This paper investigates possible indicators of collaboration effectiveness and quality of individuals’ contribution that could be extracted from the data available in repositories of FLOSS projects. The ultimate purpose of this effort is to develop quantitative metrics for these indicators and merge such metrics into a global metric for FLOSS software quality to be used in a certification process.

There is an ample debate over the quality of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) with mixed research results. The authors show that a reason for these mixed results is that quality is being defined, measured, and evaluated differently. They report the most popular approaches including software structure measures, process measures, and maturity assessment models. The way researchers have built their samples has also contributed to the mixed results with different project properties being considered and ignored. Because FLOSS projects evolve with each release, their quality does too, and it must be measured using metrics that take into account their communities’ commitment to quality rather than just the structure of the resulting code. Challenges exist in defining what constitutes a defect or bug, and the role of modularity in affecting FLOSS quality. The authors suggest three considerations for future research on FLOSS quality models: (1) defect resolution rate, (2) kind of software product, and (3) modularity—both technical and organizational.

In this article a perspective of relating various Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects and linking different FLOSS developers is given. Specifically, by viewing projects and developers as characterized by their choices of features such as intended audiences, licenses, programming languages, operating systems, and topics, two-mode networks are generated to link projects (or developers) to their feature choices. Based on the generated networks, similarities among projects and among developers are calculated, and projects (or developers) are clustered through their measured similarities. Implication to this perspective can be the provision of project and developer recommendation services to extend developers' social networks beyond their participated projects and also to facilitate the sharing of information. This perspective also opens the possibility of discovering free software ideologists in FLOSS community.

Research in virtual teams and distributed work argues that the lack of collocation places an overhead on the performance potential of large, globally distributed teams. In this paper, we revisit this tenet through a case study of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development to demonstrate how globally dispersed FLOSS communities manage to overcome the problem of geographic separation of their members. Our results show that successful FLOSS teams demonstrate a truly global distribution of members, who perform different types of work so as to achieve consistent round-the-clock development, without any apparent ill effects on team productivity and the quality of the resulting outcomes. Cooperation between team members is abundant, especially at more complex work items, and does not seem to be affected by distance; only mentoring relationships appear in some cases to be easier to cultivate between individuals living closer together. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom of research in distributed work, in cases where virtual teams consist of highly skilled and motivated individuals, who leverage the power of communication technologies to overcome problems associated with physical distance.

Established contributors are the backbone of many free/libre open source software (FLOSS) projects. Previous research has shown that it is critically important for projects to retain contributors and it has also revealed the motivations behind why contributors choose to participate in FLOSS in the first place. However, there has been limited research done on the reasons why established contributors disengage, and factors (on an individual and project level) that predict their disengagement. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-methods empirical study, combining surveys and survival modeling, to identify the reasons and predictive factors behind established contributor disengagement. We find that different groups of established contributors tend to disengage for different reasons; however, overall contributors most commonly cite some kind of transition (e.g., switching jobs or leaving academia). We also find that factors such as the popularity of the projects a contributor works on, whether they have experienced a transition, when they work, and how much they work are all factors that can be used to predict their disengagement from open source.

Given the substantial growth that software and IT sector has had in the last decade, it becomes relevant to measure the impact that this expansion has had on the development of emerging economies. Specifically, the study of the FLOSS production activity is relevant given its contribution to the Knowledge Intensive Services Sector. The aim of this study is to design an innovation survey for the software sector that considers the FLOSS activity separately. Moreover, the paper describes an extensive systematization, evaluation and analysis of diverse technological surveys carried out on the software activity and the FLOSS surveys available specified at a firm level, as a way to collect all the possible background which allows proposing a questionnaire that measures the particularities of FLOSS.

Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is registering an important rise in popularity and has become a strong asset in software development. Due to their nature, FLOSS projects depend heavily on their community. A strong open source community behind a project provides certain guarantees for the project's quality and survivability. It is for this reason that so many FLOSS teams have as a priority the creation of healthy communities around their projects. This paper aims to present the efforts and experiences of the small team behind Mood bile: Mobile Learning for Moodle (www.moodbile.org), to create such a community that will help support the project and actively aid in its evolution. We present the steps taken thus far, their potential risks, their outcomes and the plans for the future as we strive to achieve critical mass for the community.

The FLOSSMetrics project has set up a system that has already collected detailed information from software development repositories of about 3,000 FLOSS (free, libre, open source software) projects. The system is capable of retrieving data from source code management, mailing lists, and issue tracking repositories. All the data obtained is stored in an SQL database, with a structure intended to facilitate further analysis and studies. All the data is also published, so that researchers can use it for their own purposes. This paper describes how FLOSSMetrics can be used to better understand how a FLOSS project is developed, and how several projects can be compared, by analyzing some VoIP clients.

<p>The purpose of this research was to identify factors that affect participants’ satisfaction with their experience of a free/libre open source software (FLOSS) project. The research built on existing models of user satisfaction from the information systems literature, and also incorporated two characteristics of FLOSS projects first identified by Ye, Nakakoji, Yamamoto, and Kishida (2005), product openness and process openness. The central research question it answered was, What factors influence participant satisfaction with a free/libre and open source application software project? Richard Stallman’s reasons for setting up the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation arose from his frustration at being forced to be a passive user of software used for a Xerox printer. These suggest that being able to be an active participant in a FLOSS project is one factor that should be examined, and therefore the first sub-question this project answers is, What types of contributions do participants make to free/libre and open source software projects? Several studies have shown that the extent of participation in a FLOSS project varies from individual to individual, and this variation leads to the second sub-question, Do the factors that influence satisfaction vary for different types of participation? If so, in what way? A preliminary conceptual model of factors affecting participant satisfaction was developed, reflecting the key concepts identified in the literature. The main theoretical goal of this research was to test the model using empirical data. The research used a sequential, mixed methods approach. The first, qualitative stage involved reviewing documents from selected projects and interviewing a purposive sample of FLOSS project participants. The second, quantitative stage involved an online survey of FLOSS project participants, and the data gathered were used to test the conceptual model. The results of the first stage showed that participation in FLOSS projects was a more complex construct than previously reported in the literature. Seven distinct categories of activities were identified: • use; • interaction with code; • supporting the community; • outreach; • sponsorship; • management; and • governance. Four attributes that modified these categories were also identified: organisational focus, role formality, remuneration, and time commitment. Data from 154 responses to the online survey were used to test the model using stepwise multiple regression, which determined the effect of each of the variables on overall participant satisfaction. Moderated regression analysis was used to test the effects of three potential moderating variables. The results showed that that perceived system complexity had the largest effect, decreasing satisfaction if respondents perceived that the software was complex, while project openness and perceived developer communication quality accounted for the most variance in satisfaction. The main theoretical contribution of this research lies in its extension of satisfaction studies to FLOSS communities, showing that communication and openness are more important than in conventional software projects. Its practical contribution will help people involved in the management and governance of FLOSS projects to identify ways of increasing their participants’ satisfaction, which may in turn encourage them to contribute more.</p>

<p>The purpose of this research was to identify factors that affect participants’ satisfaction with their experience of a free/libre open source software (FLOSS) project. The research built on existing models of user satisfaction from the information systems literature, and also incorporated two characteristics of FLOSS projects first identified by Ye, Nakakoji, Yamamoto, and Kishida (2005), product openness and process openness. The central research question it answered was, What factors influence participant satisfaction with a free/libre and open source application software project? Richard Stallman’s reasons for setting up the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation arose from his frustration at being forced to be a passive user of software used for a Xerox printer. These suggest that being able to be an active participant in a FLOSS project is one factor that should be examined, and therefore the first sub-question this project answers is, What types of contributions do participants make to free/libre and open source software projects? Several studies have shown that the extent of participation in a FLOSS project varies from individual to individual, and this variation leads to the second sub-question, Do the factors that influence satisfaction vary for different types of participation? If so, in what way? A preliminary conceptual model of factors affecting participant satisfaction was developed, reflecting the key concepts identified in the literature. The main theoretical goal of this research was to test the model using empirical data. The research used a sequential, mixed methods approach. The first, qualitative stage involved reviewing documents from selected projects and interviewing a purposive sample of FLOSS project participants. The second, quantitative stage involved an online survey of FLOSS project participants, and the data gathered were used to test the conceptual model. The results of the first stage showed that participation in FLOSS projects was a more complex construct than previously reported in the literature. Seven distinct categories of activities were identified: • use; • interaction with code; • supporting the community; • outreach; • sponsorship; • management; and • governance. Four attributes that modified these categories were also identified: organisational focus, role formality, remuneration, and time commitment. Data from 154 responses to the online survey were used to test the model using stepwise multiple regression, which determined the effect of each of the variables on overall participant satisfaction. Moderated regression analysis was used to test the effects of three potential moderating variables. The results showed that that perceived system complexity had the largest effect, decreasing satisfaction if respondents perceived that the software was complex, while project openness and perceived developer communication quality accounted for the most variance in satisfaction. The main theoretical contribution of this research lies in its extension of satisfaction studies to FLOSS communities, showing that communication and openness are more important than in conventional software projects. Its practical contribution will help people involved in the management and governance of FLOSS projects to identify ways of increasing their participants’ satisfaction, which may in turn encourage them to contribute more.</p>

Free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) communities are commonly understood according to the Onion model. This thesis presents an alternative approach of understanding participation, the habitualepisodic lens drawn from the general volunteering literature. Episodic volunteering (EV) is an alternative way of understanding the periphery of the Onion model which takes into consideration recent developments in FLOSS communities, most notably the increasing role of non-code contributors. The overall objective of my work is to evaluate how the management of short-term and peripheral contributors could be improved. Using the EV lens, This thesis considers two of the most important problems in EV management, namely deriving value from contributors' work and retention, by describing the current state of EV in FLOSS, identifying and evaluating the factors associated with retention, identifying and evaluating practices associated with retention, and identifying and evaluating EV management practices. The contributions of this work are a description of the current state of EV in FLOSS, the creation and evaluation of a theoretical model for retention of episodic contributors, and the development of a handbook of practices for addressing the problems associated with EV in FLOSS.

In this paper, we review research on voluntary organizations to identify key features of and problems in volunteer work and organizations. We then use the example of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development teams to examine how those features and problems apply in this situation and how they might be affected by the use of information and communications technologies (ICT). We suggest that understanding volunteer organizations can illuminate the changing nature of all knowledge work, paid as well as unpaid.

Successful Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects must attract and retain high-quality talent. Researchers have invested considerable effort in the study of core and peripheral FLOSS developers. To this point, one critical subset of developers that have not been studied are One-Time code Contributors (OTC) - those that have had exactly one patch accepted. To understand why OTCs have not contributed another patch and provide guidance to FLOSS projects on retaining OTCs, this study seeks to understand the impressions, motivations, and barriers experienced by OTCs. We conducted an online survey of OTCs from 23 popular FLOSS projects. Based on the 184 responses received, we observed that OTCs generally have positive impressions of their FLOSS project and are driven by a variety of motivations. Most OTCs primarily made contributions to fix bugs that impeded their work and did not plan on becoming long term contributors. Furthermore, OTCs encounter a number of barriers that prevent them from continuing to contribute to the project. Based on our findings, there are some concrete actions FLOSS projects can take to increase the chances of converting OTCs into long-term contributors.

Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has become a strategic asset in software development, and open source communities behind FLOSS are a key player in the field. The analysis of open source community dynamics is a key capability in risk management practices focused on the integration of FLOSS in all types of organizations. We are conducting research in developing methodologies for managing risks of FLOSS adoption and deployment in various application domains. This paper is about the ability to systematically capture, filter, analyze, reason about, and build theories upon, the behavior of an open source community in combination with the structured elicitation of expert opinions on potential organizational business risk. The novel methodology presented here blends together qualitative and quantitative information as part of a wider analytics platform. The approach combines big data analytics with automatic scripting of scenarios that permits experts to assess risk indicators and business risks in focused tactical and strategic workshops. These workshops generate data that is used to construct Bayesian networks that map data from community risk drivers into statistical distributions that are feeding the platform risk management dashboard. A special feature of this model is that the dynamics of an open source community are tracked using social network metrics that capture the structure of unstructured chat data. The method is illustrated with a running example based on experience gained in implementing our approach in an academic smart environment setting including Mood bile, a Mobile Learning for Moodle (www.moodbile.org). This example is the first in a series of planned experiences in the domain of smart environments with the ultimate goal of deriving a complete risk model in that field.