The subject of this work is to demonstrate how some very interesting statistics of open source projects hosted on SourceForge can be retrieved effortlessly and at low-cost. This crawled information later constitutes an ideal input for quantitative analysis of the open source movement in general. We present the full process of our experiment from crawling the data to performing the analysis. This work was started when no such information existed in literature. While performing the crawl, we found out about another project of similar nature, OssMole [2]. We provide the results of this experiment nonetheless because the two projects use different strategies for crawling data. Using OssMole’s data also lets us make some interesting cross-comparisons and derive conclusions about temporal changes going on at SourceForge.

The present contribution proposes to transfer the main principles of open source software development to a new context: conceptual modelling; an activity closely related to software development. The goal of

community is growing across and within multiple disciplines. This community faces a new and unusual situation. The traditional difficulties of gathering enough empirical data have been replaced by issues of dealing with enormous amounts of freely available public data from many disparate sources (online discussion forums, source code directories, bug reports, OSS Web portals, etc.). Consequently, these data are being discovered, gathered, analyzed, and used to support multidisciplinary research. However at present, no means exist for assembling these data under common access points and frameworks for comparative, longitudinal, and collaborative research across disciplines. Gathering and maintaining large F/OSS data collections reliably and making them usable present several research challenges. For example, current projects usually rely on direct access to, and mining of raw data from groups that generate it, and both of these methods require unique effort for each new corpus, or even for updating existing corpora. In this paper, we identify several needs and critical factors in F/OSS empirical research across disciplines, and suggest recommendations for design of a global research infrastructure for multi-disciplinary research into F/OSS development. 1.

Abstract – In this paper, the evolution of a large sample of open source software projects will be analysed. The evolution of commercial systems has been an issue that has long been a center of research, thus a coherent theoretical framework of software evolution has been developed and empirically tested. Therefore these results can be used to compare the situation in open source projects to the evolution of commercial projects. This allows to assess whether the underlying software process indeed significantly differs. The data collection methodology relying on a large software repository and the respective source code control systems is described, and an overview on the collected data on several thousand projects is given. The evolutionary behaviour is explored using both a linear and a quadratic model, with the quadratic model significantly outperforming the linear one. The most interesting fact is that while in the mean the growth rate is decreasing over time according to the laws of software evolution, especially larger projects with a higher number of participants might be more often able to sustain super-linear growth. I.

Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects are people-oriented and knowledge intensive software development environments. Many researchers focused on mailing lists to study coding activities of software developers. How expert software developers interact with each other and with non-developers in the use of community products have received little attention. This paper discusses the altruistic sharing of knowledge between knowledge providers and knowledge seekers in the Developer and User mailing lists of the Debian project. We analyze the posting and replying activities of the participants by counting the number of email messages they posted to the lists and the number of replies they made to questions others posted. We found out that participants interact and share their knowledge a lot, their positing activity is fairly highly correlated with their replying activity, the characteristics of posting and replying activities are different for different kinds of lists, and the knowledge sharing activity of self-organizing Free/Open Source communities could best be explained in terms of what we called ‘‘Fractal Cubic Distribution’ ’ rather than the power-law distribution mostly reported in the literature. The paper also proposes what could be researched in knowledge sharing activities in F/OSS projects mailing list and for what purpose. The research findings add to our understanding of knowledge sharing activities in F/OSS projects.

Abstract. Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) repositories contain valuable data and their usefulness in studying software development and community activities continues to attract a lot of research attention. A trend in F/OSS studies is the use of metadata stored in a repository of repositories or RoRs. This paper utilizes data obtained from such RoRs-FLOSSmole- to study the types of projects being developed by the F/OSS community. We downloaded projects by topics data in five areas (Database, Internet, Software Development, Communications, and Games/Entertainment) from Flossmole’s raw and summary data of the sourceforge repository. Time series analysis show the numbers of projects in the five topics are growing linearly. Further analysis supports our hypothesis that F/OSS development is moving ”up the stack ” from developer tools and infrastructure support to end-user applications such as Databases. The findings have implications for the interpretation of the F/OSS landscape, the utilization and adoption of open source databases, and problems researchers might face in obtaining and using data from RoRs.

Abstract. The paper investigates collaborative work among maintainers of open source software by analyzing the logs of a set of 10 large projects. We inquire whether teamwork can be influenced by several characteristics of code. Preliminary results suggest that collaboration among maintainers in most large open-source projects seems to be positively influenced by file vintage and by Halstead volume of files, and negatively by McCabe complexity and size measured in SLOCs. These results could be consistent with an increased attractivity of files created early in the history of a project, and with maintainers being less attracted by more verbose code and by more complex code, although in this last case it might also reflect the fact that more complex files would be de facto more exclusive in terms of maintenance. 1

We seek to establish and sustain an agenda for a national program for research on free/open source software (FOSS, or sometimes FLOSS) by academic and industrial researchers in different disciplines. This proposal describes our vision for such a research agenda, along with the international workshop and supporting meetings we propose to conduct in order to develop the agenda to guide future research. The activities build from recent research meetings on FOSS support multidisciplinary studies of FOSS development. We also identify our goals, assessment method, activities, outcomes, and results from recent meetings giving rise to this proposal. Following this is a specification of proposed meetings and workshop, budget, budget rationale, and brief biographical description of the proposal organizers. Why we need a national research program in Free/Open Source Software Even though Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is widely used, we believe the much of the Computer Science research community has yet to fully recognize its potential to change the world of research and development of software-intensive systems across disciplines. Tens of thousands of FOSS projects are up and running world-wide, and millions of end-users of computing increasingly rely on FOSS-based systems. Growing numbers of research projects in physical, social, and human sciences, as well as the cultural arts are now routinely expecting to develop or use FOSS-based systems to best meet their needs. Similarly, growing numbers of businesses and government organizations are now looking to develop and use mission-critical software applications that are built with FOSS components. We believe reasons for such attention and

We seek to establish and sustain an agenda for a national program for research on free/open source software (FOSS, or sometimes FLOSS) by academic and industrial researchers in different disciplines. This proposal describes our vision for such a research agenda, along with the international workshop and supporting meetings we propose to conduct in order to develop the agenda to guide future research. The activities build from recent research meetings on FOSS support multi-disciplinary studies of FOSS development. We also identify our goals, assessment method, activities, outcomes, and results from recent meetings giving rise to this proposal. Why we need a national research program in Free/Open Source Software Even though Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is widely used, we believe the much of the Computer Science research community has yet to fully recognize its potential to change the world of research and development of software-intensive systems across disciplines. Tens of thousands of FOSS projects are up and running world-wide, and millions of end-users of computing increasingly rely on FOSS-based systems. Growing numbers of research projects in physical, social, and human sciences, as well as the

Abstract: The Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) research community is growing across and within multiple disciplines. This community faces a new and unusual situation. The traditional difficulties of gathering enough empirical data have been replaced by issues of dealing with enormous amounts of freely available public data from many disparate sources (online discussion forums, source code directories, bug reports, OSS Web portals, etc.). Consequently, these data are being discovered, gathered, analyzed, and used to support multidisciplinary research. However at present, no means exist for assembling these data under common access points and frameworks for comparative, longitudinal, and collaborative research across disciplines. Gathering and maintaining large F/OSS data collections reliably and making them usable present several research challenges. For example, current projects usually rely on direct access to, and mining of raw data from groups that generate it, and both of these methods require unique effort for each new corpus, or even for updating existing corpora. In this paper we identify several common needs and critical factors in F/ OSS empirical research across disciplines, and suggest recommendations for the design of a globally shared research infrastructure for multi-disciplinary research into F/OSS development. 1.