Collecting data about FLOSS development

<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>

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.

**Editorial** Science Studies 1/2007 is the first issue by its new chief editors Dr. Tarja Knuuttila and Docent Sampsa Hyysalo. The decision to appoint two editors-in-chief was motivated by the steadily increasing amount of submissions, as well as by the need to retain a good grasp of the range of focal areas that comprise science and technology studies. Tarja Knuuttila is a philosopher of science currently studying scientific modelling and representation especially in the context of computational science. Sampsa Hyysalo’s primary field is science and technology studies. He has studied change in professional and everyday practices by focussing on the development and appropriation of health ICTs. The change in its editors does not mark a great transition in the focus of the journal. Science Studies continues to be both an international and interdisciplinary journal welcoming contributions to the study of science and technology from different points of view and different disciplinary backgrounds whether philosophical, historical, sociological, psychological, educational or politicoeconomic. At the moment the journal receives contributions from all over the world, the most contributions coming from the US and from Northern European countries. The acceptance rate is 20,5 for the moment, but it will fall, since we are receiving an increasing amount of contributions. This shows that the interest towards Science Studies is steadily growing. As to our website, Science Studies is also happy to announce that it has digitized and published all of its articles from 1988 to 1997. The ten volumes which have been published comprise over 100 articles on Science and Technology Studies and represent one of the largest fully accessible online collections available today. We are committed to distributing the content of Science Studies to as broad an audience as possible at no cost. Moreover, we have decreased our moving wall from one year to six months, allowing for increased visibility and access to our most recent content. The present volume contains four full articles concentrating mainly on science and science policy. In “From Core Set to Assemblage: On the Dynamics of Exclusion and Inclusion in the Failure to Derive Beta Cells from Embryonic Stem Cells” Mike Michael et al. concentrate on a traditional STS-theme, that of experimenter’s regress. They contrast Collins’s core set model to an analysis in terms of assemblages in an attempt to show that scientific controversies need not end in the exclusion of the discredited faction of scientists from the core set. Rather, due to several reasons such as the ‘chronic uncertainty’ of stem cell research, the epistemically defeated faction can be rehabilitated because of the ‘social understandability’ of their strategies. ”Effects of ‘Mode 2’-Related Policy on the Research Process: The Case of Publicly Funded German Nanotechnology” by Andreas Wald and “Disentangling Transdisciplinarity: An Analysis of Knowledge Integration in Problem-Oriented Research” by Wolfgang Zierhofer and Paul Burger provide somewhat critical perspectives on the supposed advantages of Mode 2 policies and the very idea that transdisciplinary research, which is also referred to as Mode 2 science, represents a genuinely new model of knowledge production. Wald argues that nanotechnology research does not fit into the picture portrayed by Mode 2 literature, yet Mode 2-related policies are applied to it in the German context. As a result of this, policies are often considered harmful by the scientists. Zierhofer and Burger in turn seek to analyze the diversity of the supposed transdisciplinary mode of knowledge production in terms of various types of research objectives and related research instruments. Finally, Matt Ratto’s paper “A Practice-Based Model of Access for Science: Linux Kernel Development and Shared Digital Resources” presents a close-quarter analysis of Linux kernel development in order to build a model of access that would be apt for examining the increasingly distributed and digitally-mediated scientific work. This last paper is also a teaser for the next issue of Science Studies, which is a special issue on Free/Libre Open source software (FLOSS). Guest edited by Dr. Yuwei Lin and Prof. Lars Risan, Science Studies 2/2007 provides a set of highly interesting and in-depth studies on organization, work and development in FLOSS projects.

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 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) 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.

This paper presents work done in the QualOSS (Quality of Open Source Software) research project,which aims at building a methodology and tools to help in the assessment of the quality of FLOSS (free, libre, open source software) endeavors. In particular, we introduce the research done to evaluate the FLOSS endeavor communities. Following the Goal-Question-Metric paradigm, QUALOSS describes goals, the associated questions and then metrics that allow to answer the questions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Software development has evolved over decades, transitioning from traditional models such as the waterfall approach and the unified process to more flexible methodologies like agile methods and collaborative development strategies of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Alongside this trend, the global distribution of software development work has increased. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the development of FLOSS projects, where contributors from various regions worldwide collaborate asynchronously on projects. In this context, the organization of interactions among developers can significantly influence a project success or failure. An example is the Linux kernel community, which has been actively discussing the models and workload of project maintainers – a topic that has received limited attention in scientific literature. This study investigated the new maintenance methods used in the Linux kernel project. With over 30 years of development, the Linux kernel has become a benchmark for FLOSS development. We discuss how the maintainers’ workload is addressed in academic literature and by practitioners in the Linux kernel community. To achieve this, we conducted a multivocal literature review to examine the evolution of maintenance models over the years.

This paper presents the results after four years of running of an instructional method that utilizes free/libre open source software (FLOSS) projects as tools for teaching software engineering in formal education. In the last four academic years, a total of 408 juniors majoring in Informatics (in a 4-year program) participated in the study, assuming the roles of requirements engineers, testers, developers, and designers/analysts. Students appreciated the benefits gained by the method and identified aspects that require further improvement. In the paper, we present (a) the details of our method, (b) students' opinions as recorded through a questionnaire including both closed and open ended questions, and (c) conclusions on how the use of FLOSS projects can be applied, and be beneficial for the students.