Do Open Source Developers Respond to Competition?: The (La)TeX Case Study

Summary form only given. In spite of the hype and hysteria surrounding open source software development, there is very little that can be said of open source in general. Open source projects range in scope from the miniscule, such as the thousands of non-maintained code dumps left behind at the end of class projects, dissertations, and failed commercial ventures, to the truly international, with thousands of developers collaborating, directly or indirectly, on a common platform. One characteristic that is shared by the largest and most successful open source projects, however, is a software architecture designed to promote anarchic collaboration through extensions while at the same time preserving centralized control over the interfaces. This paper features a survey of the state-of-the-practice in open source development in regards to software architecture, with particular emphasis on the modular extensibility interfaces within several of the most successful projects, including Apache httpd, Eclipse, Mozilla Firefox, Linux kernel, and the World Wide Web (which few people recognize as an open source project in itself). These projects fall under the general category of collaborative open source software development, which emphasizes community aspects of software engineering in order to compensate for the often-volunteer nature of core developers and take advantage of the scalability obtainable through Internet-based virtual organizations.

Background: The popularity of the open source software development in the last decade, has brought about an increased interest from the industry on how to use open source components, participate in the open source community, build business models around this type of software development, and learn more about open source development methodologies. Aim: The aim of this study is to review research carried out on usage of open source components and development methodologies by the industry, as well as companies’ participation in the open source community. Method: Systematic review through searches in library databases and manual identification of articles from the open source conference. Results: 19 articles were identified. Conclusions: The articles could be divided into four categories: open source as part of component based software engineering, business models with open source in commercial organization, company participation in open source development communities, and usage of open source processes within a company.

Many previous studies have shown that open-source technologies help democratize information and foster collaborations to enable addressing global physical and societal challenges. The outbreak of the novel coronavirus has imposed unprecedented challenges to human society. It affects every aspect of livelihood, including health, environment, transportation, and economy. Open-source technologies provide a new ray of hope to collaboratively tackle the pandemic. The role of open source is not limited to sharing a source code. Rather open-source projects can be adopted as a software development approach to encourage collaboration among researchers. Open collaboration creates a positive impact in society and helps combat the pandemic effectively. Open-source technology integrated with geospatial information allows decision-makers to make strategic and informed decisions. It also assists them in determining the type of intervention needed based on geospatial information. The novelty of this paper is to standardize the open-source workflow for spatiotemporal research. The highlights of the open-source workflow include sharing data, analytical tools, spatiotemporal applications, and results and formalizing open-source software development. The workflow includes (i) developing open-source spatiotemporal applications, (ii) opening and sharing the spatiotemporal resources, and (iii) replicating the research in a plug and play fashion. Open data, open analytical tools and source code, and publicly accessible results form the foundation for this workflow. This paper also presents a case study with the open-source spatiotemporal application development for air quality analysis in California, USA. In addition to the application development, we shared the spatiotemporal data, source code, and research findings through the GitHub repository.

“We do not appreciate being experimented on”: Developer and researcher views on the ethics of experiments on open-source projects

Open Source developers play fundamental determinant role in the life of any open source project. This paper investigates developer motivation in contributing tirelessly to an open source project. Open source Onions were investigated and the developer layer modeled and validated based on ten case studies from SourceForge. Validation was based on Delphi's four rounds of successive stages. Results show that 62% of the developers around an open source development project community are skilled programmers, and that Open source developers are largely motivated by web based development platforms with universal programming language such as Java and that Developers are mostly attracted to the GPL licensed software development project with high project publicity as could be tracked from the hit rate on the project website. Finally, the few Core developers (Project Administrators) of about 19% actually controls and oversees the affairs carried out by about 81% of many developers showing the prominence of Pareto80/20 Principle in Open Source Project development.

We study how a commercial firm competes with a free open source product. The market consists of two customer segments with different preferences and is characterized by positive network effects. The commercial firm makes product and pricing decisions to maximize its profit. The open source developers make product decisions to maximize the weighted sum of the segments' consumer surplus, in addition to their intrinsic motivation. The more importance open source developers attach to consumer surplus, the more effort they put into developing software features. Even if consumers do not end up adopting the open source product, it can act as a credible threat to the commercial firm, forcing the firm to lower its prices. If the open source developers' intrinsic motivation is high enough, they will develop software regardless of eventual market dynamics. If the open source product is available first, all participants are better off when the commercial and open source products are compatible. However, if the commercial firm can enter the market first, it can increase its profits and gain market share by being incompatible with its open source competitor, even if customers can later switch at zero cost. This first‐mover advantage does not arise because users are “locked in,” but because the commercial firm deploys a “divide and conquer” strategy to attract early adopters and exploit late adopters. To capitalize on its first‐mover advantage, the commercial firm must increase its development investment to improve its product features.

The popularity of open source has witnessed significant growth in the past two decades. The sustainability and success of open source projects rely heavily on the active community of contributors, who have the freedom to join or depart voluntarily. The churn of core developers can have detrimental effects on the continuous development and progress of these communities. Therefore, previous studies have aimed to identify the factors that influence developer churn and reveal its impact on open source communities. However, there is currently a lack of research on predicting whether a developer will leave or retain within a given timeframe. This article aims to bridge this gap by introducing a novel model called context-aware dynamic graph neural network (ConDyGNN), which is designed specifically for predicting developer churn in open source communities. By leveraging historical data, this model takes into consideration various factors such as developers’ activities, collaborative networks, and community context information. To capture both temporal dependencies and spatial correlations among different developers, temporal convolutional network (TCN) and graph convolutional network (GCN) modules are employed in <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ConDyGNN</i>. Furthermore, a context-aware module based on a multihead attention mechanism is proposed to effectively integrate macrolevel community information and enhance the predictive performance. The superiority of the proposed model is empirically demonstrated through extensive comparative experiments and an ablation study.

Robustness of the collaborative knowledge network (CKN) is critical to the success of open source projects. To study this robustness more comprehensively and accurately, we constructed a weighted CKN based on the semantic analysis of collaborative behavior, where (a) open source designers were the network nodes, (b) collaborative behavior among designers was the edges, and (c) collaborative text content intensity and collaborative frequency intensity were the edge weights. To study the robustness from a dynamic viewpoint, we constructed three CKNs from different stages of the project life cycle: the start-up, growth and maturation stages. The connectivity and collaboration efficiency of the weighted network were then used as robustness evaluation indexes. Further, we designed four edge failure modes based on the behavioral characteristics of open source designers. Finally, we carried out dynamic robustness analysis experiments based on the empirical data of a Local Motors open source car design project. Our results showed that the CKN performed differently at different stages of the project life cycle, and our specific findings could help community managers of open source projects to formulate different network protection strategies at different stages of their projects.

In open source software development, a major challenge is the prioritization of new requirements as well as the identification of responsible developers for their implementation. Unlike conventional industrial software development, where requirements engineers have to explicitly define who implements what, in the context of open source development, developers (contributors) usually decide on their own which requirements to implement next. Contributors have to deal with a huge number of requirements where the recognition of the most relevant ones often becomes a crucial task with a high impact on the success of a software project. This fact defines our major motivation for the development of a prioritization tool for the ECLIPSE community which recommends relevant requirements (issues/bugs) to open source developers. Our tool uses real-world data from ECLIPSE in order to build a prediction model. We trained and tested our tool with different classifiers such as Naive Bayes (representing our baseline), Decision Tree, and Random Forest. The evaluation results indicate that the Random Forest classifier correctly predicts issues with a precision of 0.88 (F1-score 0.68).CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems → Recommender systems; • Humancentered computing → Open source software; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning approaches; Natural language processing; • Software and its engineering → Requirements analysis.

Review for "Trophic rewilding benefits a tropical community through direct and indirect network effects"

Purpose - This paper aims to analyze competition between two platforms with asymmetric cross indirect network effects under hidden buyer sensitivity. Platforms are differentiated by indirect network effects toward buyers that are also differentiated privately with sensitivity to the effects. Design/Methodology/Approach - We set up a platform competition model based on a signaling game and thus characterized a perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium. A nature selects two types of buyer with a certain probability. Each type of buyer chooses one platform (single-homing). Sellers can choose either single-homing or multi-homing with price setting and complete trade with buyers. Findings - First, the leading platform with stronger cross network effects does not always mandate exclusive homing for sellers. Second, in a two-sided market where the small platform is significantly weak, a leading platform does not mind seller multihoming if buyers sensitive to indirect network effects are numerous enough. However, price discrimination under seller multihoming lowers social welfare. Third, when platforms are close enough in indirect network effects, a leading platform always wants to impose mandatory exclusive homing on sellers. A seller can raise prices and narrow trades to buyers with high willingness-to-pay only responding to mandatory exclusive homing, which lowers social welfare. Research Implications - Asymmetry between platforms in indirect network effects and buyer hidden sensitivities to the effects must be scrutinized to design effective policy instruments to promote competition in the platform market.

What are the similarities of open data and open source software when building a business? Despite their differences as phenomena (one is about applications and one is about data), the two also have many similarities. Both for example share the idea that the transparency of the artifact enables contribution. Many developers of open data have experience with open source development. But do the companies that build their offerings on open data and open source have similarities, and if so, what are the similarities? Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with software entrepreneurs and managers, this paper investigates these questions through an empirical focus on openness in business and clarifies the links between commercial organizations engaged with open source and open data. The article reports similarities on how the managers use the terms open data and open source to describe their business dynamic. These similarities are of importance to those who are interested in developing services that rely on open source or open data or who are interested in community management and legal and business issues or policy.

Open Source Software (OSS) is software products available to the public, with its source code to study, change, and improves its design. Open Source Software Development (OSSD) is the process by which open source software is developed within the confines of software engineering life-cycle methods. However when open source used for commercial purpose, then an open source license is required. Open source software is very often developed in a public and collaborative manner. The quality assurance principle under open source software development is an approach to improve software product quality against traditional methods and techniques. Despite the fact that the open source developments have seen remarkable successful in recent years, there are a number of product quality issues and challenges facing the open source development model. Many industries and business sectors are following or using OSSD, since they realize the benefits, but they do have some reservations concerning quality assurance in the form of program code quality, maintenance of the code and its quality, over the life-cycle of the product and third party usage. This paper reviews the literature of the process of the latest quality assurance, under open source software development methods and techniques. The result from this review is to show the process of quality assurance of open source software and that how it can affect the overall quality assurance principal.

PurposeThis case study seeks to document the experiences of Villanova University's Falvey Library staff as they developed and implemented the VuFind open source discovery tool for libraries. It aims to address the decision to hire a programmer for the library, the decision to make the VuFind software open source, and the library's development and implementation processes.Design/methodology/approachThe author interviewed, recorded, and corresponded with members of the library staff on multiple occasions over a five‐month period during the ramp‐up to, and just after, the launch of the new software. The paper is complemented by three podcasts created from the interview material that are available online.FindingsThe creators of VuFind took a relatively informal approach to library software development. However, the resulting software has been well received, both by the library development community and Villanova University. Keys to this success were close attention to user expectations deriving from their experiences using widely available web‐based search tools and applications, a continuous process of sharing work and soliciting input, and rapid improvements to the software. The open source development process facilitated the sharing and collaboration that made this rapid improvement possible.Practical implicationsOther libraries that are considering the possibility of developing their own software may find Villanova's experience and approach useful in determining where to focus their planning and concentrate their resources.Originality/valueThe case study will be of interest to persons engaging in or considering whether to engage in open source development of a library application. It will also appeal to library administrators interested in learning about the technology planning or software development.

Management scholars have examined the persistent heterogeneity of firm performance from the first mover advantage perspective. In the same vein, first mover advantage has also been highlighted in early internationalization (or born-global) literature. However, the focus of much of this work has been on the heterogeneity of firm characteristics and capabilities and their impacts on internationalization. We present a demand-side view of early internationalization from network effects and demand heterogeneity perspective. It is well known that when the network effect is strong, it is hard for latecomers to survive. With a formal simulation model, we suggest that latecomer firms may overcome this disadvantage by leveraging market demand heterogeneity across countries when social network effect (direct network effect) is stronger than ecosystem effect (indirect network effect).