Open Source Developer Layer Assessment

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

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.

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.

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.

The goal of the study on Fun and Software Development (FASD) is to precisely assess the importance that fun has as motivation for software developers to engage in open source projects. A survey carried out both under open source developers and programmers working in Swiss software companies yielded that the fun motive accounts for about 27 percent to 33 percent of open source developers’ motivation. Fun is a pervasive feature of software development, not only for open source programmers but in the area of commercial software development too: Open source developers that are paid for their work are observed to be very motivated and prepared for future effort, especially if they enjoy their development time. Furthermore, the fun that programmers experience functions as a good proxy for their productivity. Therefore, employers that want to enhance the programmers’ productivity can safely invest in an environment of fun for developers in their company.

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 plan to develop Evergreen, the open-source consortial library software, was announced in June 2004 by Lamar Veatch, state librarian and head of the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS). Evergreen went live in 2006. That two-year period was filled with activity. It was a major decision by GPLS to develop new software of a scope never before attempted, but it was undertaken only after it had exhausted all other alternatives to run PINES, the resource-sharing public library consortium in Georgia. Evergreen was to be designed from the ground up as a new thing: a consortial library system, that is, an integrated library system for a large, geographically dispersed, resource-sharing consortium. Why did GPLS take this path and how did it go about doing it? The decision came about after a long chain of events made over many years in Georgia as it, like all states, wrestled with how best to provide public library services to its citizens. Policy decisions over many years followed a consistent direction. Local library organizational patterns commonly follow a model of treating each library separately resulting in what today are commonly called information silos, resulting in largely separate collections with weak communications among them. Resource sharing among the libraries in most state systems is through an interlibrary loan (ILL) process. Georgia, on the other hand, has consistently chosen another direction: joining the many small public libraries into larger resource-sharing regional libraries. Other states have worked on the idea, abandoned it, taken it up again and so on. It was an idea that the library community liked in theory, but before recent developments in computer technology, Georgia's path was unusual. The fundamental problem that all states must wrestle with in providing public library service - indeed for all entities providing any library service - is the great disparity of size, wealth and resources of the many libraries that exist. There are a few very rich libraries; however, most have only modest resources. Consider these figures from the latest national-level data we have for U.S. public libraries (FY 2005). Table 1 shows that the top quartile of these libraries by their total expenditures - that is, the 25% of public libraries that spent the most - spent $7.9 billion that year while the bottom three quartiles (the 75% that spent the least) spent $1 billion in total. Indeed, to press the point, the top 10% spent $6.5 billion. Think about that: Ten percent of the public libraries in the United States spent about 6.5 times as much money as the smallest 75% of the libraries. The big libraries are very big, and the small libraries are very small, and the disparities in expenditures that these figures demonstrate are consistent across other variables such as collections, resources and staff. Moreover, they are consistent with the pattern for other types of libraries. However, our story is centered on public libraries in the United States because of decisions made by GPLS. It is useful to note that the two largest open source library systems running in the United States, Evergreen and Koha, were developed for small public library settings. If you look at the expenditure figures above, it is not hard to imagine why - the large proprietary vendors prefer to concentrate their efforts where the money is. Within the open source framework, however, Evergreen and Koha have different approaches, with Evergreen being consortial for reasons that are discussed here. The disparities in resources outlined by the data present a profound information policy question for a consensual democracy: In a system of government that relies on an informed citizenry, are such disparities acceptable? Is it acceptable for the “haves” to have access to so much more information than the “have nots”? If not, how do we ameliorate the results of this disparity? Public library service as it is configured in the United States today developed before Google and other modern software developments that have relentlessly broken down information silos in other fields. Their configuration cannot adequately provide the vast pools of information and materials that are now available to the citizenry. One step in the right direction is consortial resource sharing, and another is to use these consortia to pool money to buy access to enhanced content for all the libraries in the consortium - especially those that could not otherwise have afforded this content - the “everything everywhere” library consortium. In its history (at least by the 1940s), Georgia decided to follow its subsequently consistent policy - with the normal stops and starts involved with politics - to bind the small public libraries in the state into larger, regional entities for resource sharing. That strategy was Georgia's way to get library resources to the “have nots.” The state provided both funding and direction toward that end. Although Georgia's largest libraries are typically independent, the smaller ones today are mostly in regional systems. In 1998, David Singleton, then at GPLS and now at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library in Charlotte, North Carolina, suggested a universal borrower card for Georgia's public library users. Such a card would allow all citizens of Georgia to borrow an item from any library. Given both the amount of state funding and state strategic practices to group libraries into regions, such an idea was possible. Of course, the idea was not new to Georgia, but it fell on receptive Georgia soil since the infrastructure and the general acceptance of the idea of sharing resources were in place. Because of years of preparation, state guidance and vision, the idea would work. Y2K - the computer problem that existed because of the way computers handled dates - in the end was what led to the creation of PINES (the Georgia public library resource sharing network - the network of Georgia's regional library systems). Y2K money was allocated by the state, and an RFP for a statewide system was issued. One vendor's product stood out, and PINES was born in 1999 with Phase 1 linking 26 library systems with 90 outlets (central libraries, branches and bookmobiles). PINES was an immediate success. PINES users liked being able to borrow books from a larger set of libraries with a richer set of collections than one local library. They liked access to the longer tail, and PINES added more libraries and more users. Library users altered their behavior, and many bypassed their local libraries to have access to the larger, virtual collection. PINES grew until it started having problems with the underlying software that, famously, resulted in the system's production servers having to be rebooted during the middle of the day in order to be able to handle control of the transactions load. The software had reached a previously unknown limit. Given that the software that ran PINES is running other systems that have higher circulations and larger bibliographic databases than PINES, what limit had been reached? There were several, but the central one was the system could not keep up with the update load. The software was not designed for a consortium spread over a large area with updates such as checkouts, check-ins and cataloging changes to the central database coming from so many different places. In such a system, there are many people logged into the system changing the database at any one time, and the database, to be useful, has to be current. It should reflect what is checked in or out (transactions) and what the system owns (inventory) so that users searching will know if an item is available and librarians will know the state of items in the system. These functions are basic to a modern inventory control system. In PINES, there are thousands of terminals across the state logged into the database making changes, and each change has to be reflected in the database by “reindexing” it. While rebooting in this old system allowed the system to catch up with the changes, it could not be done frequently enough. The limit reached was a hard one, and there was no solution using that software. Meanwhile, more libraries wanted to join PINES. All the while, the circulation load was large and increasing. Any large piece of software has a design architecture: how it organizes its elements, what tools it uses, that is, how it does what it does. The design architecture, in turn, is a function of various factors, the two most important being system architecture and computer costs. Many old versions of old software still litter the ILS ecosystem. The software then running PINES began development in the era when mainframes ruled the earth. This legacy software has been adapted and changed and added to over the years. Elements had been bolted on and kludged, but, it is a fact that updating deployed software has proven to be an almost impossible task almost every time it has been tried. There are a thousand problems, and what most vendors of library software have done is start over using the more modern updated practices of the time. When the original PINES software was developed, computers were immensely expensive and software comparatively primitive. Better practices and more capable small computers existed when Evergreen was envisioned, and the developers used more modern software development processes to run on more capable computers that no longer cost a million dollars each to buy. An examination of alternatives in the market found none that had the capabilities necessary to run PINES then or in the future. What was Georgia to do? Limit PINES? Give up and abandon a policy direction it had followed so consistently and that had produced such benefits? Over software? After much discussion, GPLS embarked on a revolutionary path - an open source, consortial library system to run PINES. Work began on Evergreen mid-2004. The later a software system is developed, the more modern practices can be used in that development. Evergreen, for instance, was web-aware and used Unicode for text storage and representation from the beginning. To implement these capabilities, Evergreen did not require the costly and difficult rewrites to the foundational code necessary for ILSs that had their basic code written before Unicode had been developed. Unicode is important because it allows a system to handle non-Roman scripts, including characters in Chinese and Arabic. Evergreen's development began with practices then in place in the business world. These practices today result in software that is modular, scalable and relatively easy to update - at least compared to legacy software that is even as little as five years old. Evergreen uses a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with representational state transfer (REST) and “n-tier” architectural design concepts. Let us explore these concepts a bit. The development philosophy behind these elements is that software is based on distributed services that communicate and collaborate through a set of standards, that is, it should be “service oriented.” In Evergreen, the open scalable request framework (OpenSRF, pronounced “open surf”) is such an SOA framework. OpenSRF is, in many ways, the key to Evergreen because it does so many things. OpenSRF provides load balancing and is robust and scalable. It also allows the development of software without requiring a detailed knowledge of Evergreen's structure. In effect, the Evergreen layer consists of a number of applications each of which rides on top of OpenSRF. The result is that the developer need only know the APIs and what information the program elements require and what they will reply to write new capabilities into Evergreen. OpenSRF handles the details of implementing a stateful, decentralized service architecture while the Evergreen code supplies the interface and business logic. OpenSRF is now a separate open source project. Networking follows a design philosophy that is often introduced to students with the OSI Reference Model. The model describes seven layers that pass information among each other to provide network services in a manner similar to what one finds with SOA. “N-tier” application architecture is a related idea where the tiers communicate and collaborate with each other by established standards. We see these operations in our daily lives. If, for example, a new version of Firefox comes out, we can change the old version for the new one without changing the operating system or reformatting our hard drives. We usually do not even have to reboot. Why? Because of the underlying architecture where each program communicates with the other parts of the network software by established rules - application programming interfaces (APIs) - that specify how the various elements involved exchange needed information. So, to change a part or one tier does not require a massive rewrite of the entire code, just what needs to be adjusted. As mentioned, the Evergreen middle layer rides on top of OpenSRF, and the user interfaces (the OPAC and staff client) ride on top of Evergreen. In short, REST is a set of principles that establishes an architectural style for large, scalable applications. Evergreen also uses other open source projects - there are no proprietary pieces in Evergreen - to supply needed functionality. One advantage of open source applications is that a developer working on one project can use what is already tested and proven by other projects. PostgreSQL (“Postgres”) is an enterprise-grade relational database system with over 15 years of development. It was chosen for Evergreen because it was virtually the only open source database system that had the capabilities to support a system with the database structure and the transactions load the size of PINES. Another key application is XUL (pronounced “zool”) which stands for XML user interface language. Developed by the Mozilla project, XUL allows fully featured cross-platform web applications. Perhaps the best known XUL-driven application is the Firefox web browser. There are, as you see, a number of pieces to the Evergreen puzzle. These modules work together, and each can be changed when necessary without affecting the others as long as the changes do not affect the communications among them. Using these practices, coupled with the open source framework, provided a flexible method for very rapid development of Evergreen in the early days and continues to this day. Focus groups were formed to ask library staff and patrons what features they would like to see and how they would like the OPAC to perform. How well they did that job is indicated by the increased usage that followed the introduction of Evergreen. For instance, year-over-year, holds increased by 30% - same libraries, same network, but a new interface that users found easier to use, and they did. The general process for development was “release early, release often,” a process followed to this day. Small, iterative changes were made and released for comment and testing - not rare mega updates. If there were a problem, the software could be fixed relatively quickly. In addition, the software was open source so that it was developed in the open, not secretly by a small group. Many eyes looking at software makes better code. Another aspect of Evergreen's development is “scratching an itch.” That is, development tends to focus on the problems that people want fixed, not necessarily theoretical problems or capabilities dreamt up by product managers in response to real or imagined competitive pressures. Any kind of software development will have its strengths and weaknesses. Scratching an itch will solve problems people really have, but the community does need a mechanism to guide development strategically to make sure that while solving this or that problem the software stays a coherent whole. As a result of what was learned about the first iteration of PINES, there were several key results expected from Evergreen. The original charge was to build something “scalable, robust and fault-tolerant.” And, of course, open source. What do those three new terms mean? Scalable means that the software can be deployed in different-sized libraries and that adding capacity is relatively easy. At the point where the decision was being made to move from the proprietary system that ran PINES, the server upgrade for the old system would have cost $1.5 million for a large server. Evergreen development cost the GPLS much less than that. Learning that lesson, Evergreen can be upgraded by adding “commodity” servers - that is, servers from any manufacturer or any do-it-yourself builder, and they can be added as needed. OpenSRF, clearly, allows Evergreen to scale easily. Because Evergreen is easy to use - remember the focus groups - as a library's users learn the software, they use it more, and growth can be done by adding relatively cheap, redundant servers, not million dollar boxes running proprietary software. Add a server or two, load OpenSRF, and you have upgraded. Evergreen runs on laptops, is currently running on a home library, and runs PINES with 16 million circulation transactions. Robust. Evergreen was designed to be able to keep functioning in dire circumstances. When a backhoe severed the PINES network, the Evergreen staff clients allowed libraries that were disconnected from the central databases to continue checking out books. When the network was restored, the database was updated by an established procedure. There was no need to write down transactions on paper. Consider: PINES has had a number of days recently with 100,000 circulations. If half the network were down for a half a day, that could be 25,000 sheets of paper to be managed. Not with Evergreen. Fault-tolerant. Servers can fail, and the system will keep on functioning. The use of redundant servers allows one to fail and the others to keep on functioning. Evergreen was designed as much as possible to never go down. Reflecting its history, Evergreen does not have acquisitions nor serials modules. Work on these two services is ongoing with releases expected by Spring 2009. It is a development project, but one coming from the library world to solve library problems. As was observed above, it has been quite difficult in the past to update software to reflect new demands on it. It did prove relatively easy to add web awareness to most existing library software but rather more difficult to add Web 2.0 capabilities and Unicode. Consortial capabilities have proved daunting. And as a result of Evergreen such capabilities are now touted by software in the market that may soon have those capabilities, too. How does Evergreen avoid these kinds of pitfalls of obsolescence? Maybe it doesn't but Evergreen's practices reflect the current best guess about how to engineer software so updating it is never as painful as it has been in the past with code bases even a few years old. Welcome to the future, version 1.

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

Most research on open source software communities has focused on those that are community founded. More recently, firms have founded their own open source communities. How do sponsored open source communities differ from their autonomous counterparts? With comparative examination of 12 open source projects initiated by corporate sponsors, we identify three design parameters that together help form a participation architecture—the opportunity structure extended to potential external contributors. In exploring sponsors' community design decisions, we found that sponsored open source projects were more likely to offer transparency than they were accessibility and that this had implications for their communities' growth. We contribute theoretical constructs that offer a common basis of comparison for the future study of open source projects and illustrate how the tension between control and growth affects open source community design and creation.

Open Source Design Practices (OSDP) have value in contributing knowledge to the design community. OSDP allows information to freely flow without the limitations of traditional academic practices. The most vital component of OSPD is the people who come together to create the projects: the volunteers. Volunteers can derive many benefits from participating in OPSD, such as social networking and skill building. This paper looks at the systemic issues that have challenged the wider adaptation of open source into the practice of the mainstream design community. One reason that Open Source projects may fail to generate momentum to completion is the lack of acknowledgment that volunteers receive for their participation and contribution to given projects. Open Source projects often lack financial incentives and require other forms of recognition such as intangible value for social interactions among members. Literature in direct relation to Open Source is new and limited in scope. The project goal is to test and experiment with tools that will assist in building community and connections that can be sustained in the OSDP community. The approach to this problem began with the analysis of process value in relation to the field of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. A group of dedicated Industrial and Organizational psychologists, (Allee, 2015) have written extensively on the importance of identifying value in group participation. Their research emphasizes that projects must build strong value networks in the form of social capital and knowledge exchange. The project approach, building on the literature examined, is to develop an interactive tool to assist project leaders in the identification of the skills each project participant brings to an Open Source development team. Susan Leigh Star defines boundary objects as "scientific objects which both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them. Boundary objects are thus objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites" (Star, 2015). The goal is to develop knowledge into a social network web through the development of a collaborative tool or boundary object. Through an analytical process, active participant skills are mapped to create a formal Social Network Analysis (SNA). This process could uncover possible unidentified social and knowledge capital. Once identified and represented, I anticipate that project leads will be able to use this information to match participants who have knowledge of a particular skill with those who want to acquire those skills. Over the course of a project, this will help build a social network, which will strengthen group cohesion and sustain volunteer engagement.

Chapter 9 - What To Avoid—Known Problems and Failures

In the recent years, there has been a surge in the adoption of agile development model and continuous integration (CI) in software development. Recent trends have reduced average release cycle lengths to as low as 1--2 weeks, leading to an extensive number of studies in release engineering. Open-source development (OSD) has also witnessed a rapid increase in release rates, however, no large dataset of open-source projects exists which features high release rates. In this paper, we introduce the RapidRelease dataset, a data showcase of high release frequency open-source projects. The dataset hosts 994 projects from Github, with over 2 million issue reports. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset that can facilitate researchers to empirically study release engineering and agile software development in open-source projects with rapid releases.

Open source: does transparency lead to security?

In this paper, we provide a preliminary evaluation of the quality and quantity of data on 50000 open source (OS) projects hosted at the SourceForge.net portal. Using several indicators of project activity, we identify one sample from the entire dataset: the 'most-broadly-active' OS projects. The number of projects that are active across all of our main indicators of activity account for less than 1% of the projects on the portal. 75% of the projects currently hosted on the SourceForge.net portal are not, and have never really been, active on the portal. Furthermore, whilst there has been a substantial increase in the number of projects being added to SourceForge.net over time, the number of projects being added that then go on to become most-broadly-active projects seems to be decreasing over time. Finally, we recognise that care needs to be taken in defining samples, such as the most-broadly-active projects, as these definitions raise implications for the conclusions that one makes and the generalisations that one should draw

Background: Despite its impact on innovation, gender diversity remains far from fully being achieved in open-source projects. Aims: We examine gender diversity in Hugging Face (HF) organizations, investigating its impact on innovation and team dynamics in open-source development projects. Method: We conducted a repository mining study, focusing on ML model development projects on HF, to explore the involvement of women in collaborative processes. Results: Women are highly underrepresented in both organizations and commits distribution, which is also found when analyzing individual developers. Conclusions: Addressing gender disparities is essential to create more equitable, diverse, and inclusive open-source ecosystems.