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The success of the Linux operating system has demonstrated the viability of an alternative form of software development – open source software – that challenges traditional assumptions about software markets. Understanding what drives open source developers to participate in open source projects is crucial for assessing the impact of open source software. This article identifies two broad types of motivations that account for their participation in open source projects. The first category includes internal factors such as intrinsic motivation and altruism, and the second category focuses on external rewards such as expected future returns and personal needs. This article also reports the results of a survey administered to open source programmers.

This paper presents a mixin based class and method combination mechanism with block structure propagation. Traditionally, mixins can be composed to form new classes, possibly merging the implementations of methods (as in CLOS). In our approach, a class or method combination operation may cause any number of implicit combinations. For example, it is possible to specify separate aspects of a family of classes, and then combine several aspects into a full-fledged class family. The combination expressions would explicitly combine whole-family aspects, and by propagation implicitly combine the aspects for each member of the class family, and again by propagation implicitly compose each method from its aspects. As opposed to CLOS, this is type-checked statically; and as opposed to other systems for advanced class combination/merging/weaving, it is integrated directly in the language, ensuring a clear semantics and a seamless interaction with the type system. Moreover, the ba...

One fundamental challenge for the design of the interactive systems of the future is to invent and design environments and cultures in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Unfortunately, a large number of new media are designed from a perspective of viewing and treating humans primarily as consumers. The possibility for humans to be and act as designers (in cases in which they desire to do so) should be accessible not only to a small group of “high-tech scribes, ” but rather to all interested individuals and groups. Meta-design characterizes activities, processes, and objectives to create new media and environments that allow users to act as designers and be creative. In this paper we discuss problems addressed by our research on meta-design, provide a conceptual framework for metadesign, and illustrate our developments in the context of a particular system, the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory.

This paper discusses the economic merits of direct or indirect governmental support for open source projects. Software markets differ from standard textbook markets in three important respects that may give rise to market failures: (i) large economies of scale, (ii) crucially important innovations, (iii) significant network effects and switching costs. We analyze the differences between proprietary software and open source software with respect to these market features and ask whether open source as an alternative to proprietary software can mitigate these problems. Then we discuss the implications of various forms of governmental support for open source.

Collections of already developed programs are important resources for efficient development of reliable software systems. In this paper, we propose a novel method of ranking software components, called Component Rank, based on analyzing actual use relations among the components and propagating the significance through the use relations. We have developed a component-rank computation system, and applied it to various Java programs. The result is promising such that non-specific and generic components are ranked high. Using the Component Rank system as a core part, we are currently developing Software Product Archiving, analyzing, and Retrieving System named SPARS.

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Software’s increasingly critical role in systems of widespread significance presents new challenges for the education of software engineers. Not only is our dependence on software increasing, but the character of software production is itself changing – and with it the demands on the software developers. Four challenges for educators of software developers help identify aspirations for software engineering education.

Complex design problems require more knowledge than any one single person can possess, and the knowledge relevant to a problem is often distributed and controversial. Rather than being a limiting factor, symmetry of ignorance can provide the foundation for social creativity. Bringing different points of view together and trying to create a shared understanding among all stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. Social creativity can be supported by new media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and solving these problems. These new media need to be designed from a meta-design perspective by creating environments in which stakeholders can act as designers and be more than consumers. Keywords conceptual frameworks for creativity and cognition, consumers, designers, impact of new media on design, meta-design, social creativity, symmetry of ignorance Gerhard Fischer 2 KBS Special Issues C&C99 INTRODUCTION______________________________________...

Projects where developers are geographically distributed and with high personnel turnover are usually considered to be hard to manage. Any organisation that successfully handles such projects merits closer analysis so that lessons can be learned and good practice disseminated. Open Source Software projects represent such a case. One important factor is good configuration management practices. In this paper, the authors examine the configuration management process for some Open Source Software projects and analyse how process, tool support, and people aspects of configuration management contribute to this success. Finally, we discuss best practices and how lessons learned from Open Source Software can be transferred to more traditional ways of developing software. 1.