Competency rallying in electronic markets: implications for open source project success

Whereas there are several instances of Open Source Software (OSS) projects that have achieved huge success in the market, a high failure rate has been reported for OSS projects. This study conducts a literature survey to gain insight into existing studies on the success of OSS projects. More specifically, this study seeks to extract the critical success factors for OSS projects. Based on the literature survey in this study, the authors found determinants of success in OSS projects and classified them into three broad categories of project traits, product traits, and network structure. These findings have important implications for both the OSS research community and OSS practitioners.

Abstract— Open source software represents a new paradigm of software development based on a subjacent community. It is widely accepted in the literature the layered structure of open source communities, being the core group the most active contributors usually located at the center of the community. The tasks of this group include not only an intense activity in terms of contributions but also to promote participation among the rest of the community members. In this paper, the general role of this group is analyzed by modeling communities as Social Networks and applying Social Network Analysis techniques. Findings related their brokerage activity with open source software success. Keywords-wireless Open source communities; Virtual communities; Social Network Analysis; brokerage role. I. I NTRODUCTION Open Source Software (OSS) projects constitute a prominent example of software development based on communities [1]. They are supported by a community of developers and users who work in geographically distributed locations, rarely or never meet face to face, and coordinate their activities making an intense use of Internet. The wide success of several well known Open Source Software (OSS) projects has attracted much attention. Software engineering researchers and commercial companies alike have been trying to learn lessons from the success of OSS and apply some of them to the development of proprietary software [2]. However, there is a cruel reality that the vast majority of OSS projects fail to take off and soon become abandoned [3]. According to the popular open source portal, SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/), most OSS projects have ended in failure: 58% do not move beyond the alpha developmental stage, 22% remain in the planning phase, 17% remain in the pre-alpha phase, and some become inactive [4]. Previous studies on OSS have been mainly focused on motivation of people participating in subjacent virtual communities. Motivations have been found to range from problem solving [5] [6], to reputation benefits and career opportunities [7] [8] [9]. But a more reduced amount of work has been focused on communities’ structure. It has been demonstrated that much of the OSS development is realized by a small percentage of individuals despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of available developers. Such concentration is called “participation inequality” [10], [11], and it can be explained by the different user profiles of open source communities. Consequently, the structure of OSS communities is not completely flat as it was claimed by the bazaar model of full participation [12]. II. OSS C

This panel will present several experiences in involving students in Open Source Software (OSS) projects from the perspectives of both the instructor and a member of the OSS community. OSS is growing rapidly and gaining market share in both industry (e.g., Linux and Mozilla) as well as academia (e.g, Moodle, Greenfoot, and Drupal). OSS projects have a culture built on volunteer participation to support software development. Computing degree programs desire to involve students in large-scale software projects to provide students with real-world experience and an understanding of the issues found in large, complex software projects. Involving computing students in OSS projects serves both the OSS community by providing development resources for the project while also serving the academic community by providing access to large software projects in which students can gain experience. However, the marriage of student and OSS project presents some challenges including identification of approachable OSS projects, creation of appropriate educational infrastructure, evaluation and grading, and more. Panelists will address the factors that contribute to student success in an OSS project.

Successful open source software (OSS) projects can be considered as examples of how ambitious work results can be achieved in web-based collaboration even when monetary incentives are low or absent. While former explorations of motivational processes in OSS projects primarily focused on person-oriented aspects such as motives, interests, and expected benefits of contributors, job-related factors have been largely neglected. After discussing the limitations of a person-oriented focus, a research perspective is suggested that concentrates on job design and work context in OSS based on frameworks from work psychology. A theoretical analysis is presented discussing job characteristics of successful OSS projects as potential explanations of the high motivation of OSS contributors. Compared to a person-oriented perspective, the results of a job-oriented approach might be better transferable to other projects (both OSS and “closed source” software development) and provide guidelines for the governance of successful web-based collaboration.

The success of open source software (OSS) projects relies on voluntary contributions from various community roles. Among these roles, being a committer signifies gaining trust and higher privileges in OSS projects. Substantial studies have focused on the requirements of becoming a committer in OSS projects, but most of them are based on interviews or several hypotheses, lacking a comprehensive understanding of committers' qualifications. To address this knowledge gap, we explore both the policies and practical implementations of committer qualifications in modern top OSS communities. Through a thematic analysis of these policies, we construct a taxonomy of committer qualifications, consisting of 26 codes categorized into nine themes, including "Personnel-related to Project", "Communication", and "Long-term Participation". We also highlight the variations in committer qualifications emphasized in different OSS community governance models. For example, projects following the "core maintainer model" place great importance on project comprehension, while projects following the "company-backed model" place significant emphasis on user issue resolution. Based on the above findings, we propose eight sets of metrics and perform survival analysis on two representative OSS projects to understand how these qualifications are implemented in practice. We find that the probability of gaining commit rights decreases as participation time passes. The selection criteria in practice are generally consistent with the community policies. Developers who submit high-quality code, actively engage in code review, and make extensive contributions to related projects are more likely to be granted commit rights. However, there are some qualifications that do not align precisely, and some are not adequately evaluated. This study enhances trust understanding in top OSS communities, aids in optimal commit rights allocation, and empowers developers' self-actualization via OSS engagement.

Popularity of open source software (OSS) projects has spiked an interest in the requirements engineering (RE) practices of such communities that are starkly different from those in traditional software development projects. Past work has focused on characterizing the main differences between OSS and traditional forms of software RE. In this effort we focus on differences in RE activity in OSS. RE is characterized as a socio-technical distributed cognitive (DCog) activity where multiple actors deploy artifacts to 'compute' requirements. To uncover how OSS projects configure the socio-technical distribution of cognitive processes to respond to varying attributes of incoming requirements we conduct a comparative analysis of four successful OSS projects. We observe that the volume of requirements faced by an OSS group dictates largely the nature of its social formation while the volatility experienced in the requirements dictates the overlap the project exhibits with the larger external community. Finally the velocity of change in technological requirements influence the project's documentation practices of requirements with the level of design consistency desired in the end product influencing the decision-making channels used in the development endeavor.

Open Source Software (OSS) projects permit users the freedom to use their software code for any purpose. The code can be studied, modified and freely redistributed. Even though OSS is free, the profit potential of OSS projects is becoming very attractive to software development companies. The potential financial gain for a developer lies in the support/maintenance and proprietary add-on features they can provide for their product. While there is extensive academic literature on Information System (IS) success, there are no empirical studies identifying the determinants of OSS project success. The contribution of this research is a model for the success of security-based OSS projects based on a rule induction approach. This empirical study is based onthe analysis of publicly available data from a repository of OSS project data (SourceForge.net).

Free and open source software projects are often perceived to be of high quality. To a great extend the success of open source software seems to be due to an implicit but effective connection between communication and contributions in its development process. In this paper, we present a snapshot of the state the art on quality and success of Open Source Software (OSS) based on a review of the literature. For each of these concepts, we describe various measures considered in the literature and a number of methods by which they are obtained. Contributions to an Open Source Software (OSS) project are made through communication among developers and users. We elaborate on the concrete notions of communication and contribution in Open Source Software (OSS) and their links.

The open-source software (OSS) movement is often analogized as a commons, where products are developed by and consumed in an open community. However, does a larger commons automatically beget success or does the phenomenon fall prey to the tragedy of the commons? This research forwards and empirically investigates the curvilinear relationship between developers and OSS project quality and a project's download volume. Using segmented regression on over 12,000 SourceForge OSS projects, findings suggest an inflection point in the number of contributing developers on download volume – suggesting increasing and diminishing returns to scale from adding developers to OSS projects. Findings support the economic principle of the tragedy of the commons, a concept where an over-allocated (large number) of developers, even in an open-source environment, can lead to resource mismanagement and reduce the benefit of a public good, i.e. the OSS project.

Open Source Software (OSS) projects are no longer only developed by volunteers. Instead, many organizations, from early-stage startups to large global enterprises, actively participate in many well-known projects. The survival and success of OSS projects rely on long-term contributors, who have extensive experience and knowledge. While prior literature has explored volunteer turnover in OSS, there is a paucity of research on company turnover in OSS ecosystems. Given the intensive involvement of companies in OSS and the different nature of corporate contributors vis-a-vis volunteers, it is important to investigate company turnover in OSS projects. This study first explores the prevalence and characteristics of companies that discontinue contributing to OSS projects, and then develops models to predict companies’ turnover. Based on a study of the Linux kernel, we analyze the early-stage behavior of 1,322 companies that have contributed to the project. We find that approximately 12% of companies discontinue contributing each year; one-sixth of those used to be core contributing companies (those that ranked in the top 20% by commit volume). Furthermore, withdrawing companies tend to have a lower intensity and scope of contributions, make primarily perfective changes, collaborate less, and operate on a smaller scale. We propose a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) deep learning model based on these indicators to predict whether companies will discontinue. The evaluation results show that the model achieves an AUC metric of .76 and an accuracy of .71. We evaluated the model in two other OSS projects, Rust and OpenStack, and the performance remains stable.

The contingent role of interproject connectedness in cultivating open source software projects

Downsides of Using Inadequate Open Source Software Processes and Licenses within Standard Development Organizations

The massive emergence of Open Source Software (OSS) projects led to the rapid increment of data available to software engineers and those who would like to contribute to an OSS project. There is an arising need for a way to analyze and draw conclusions about the value of an OSS project, from an epistemic point of view. OSS projects have been used for a long time as vehicles for learning programming and software engineering. However, there is a need for more evidence about the scientific value conveyed by OSS projects. We posit that if we deeply study the dialogues of software engineers involved in the communities of the various projects and draw conclusions from them, this can be an additional way of assessing OSS projects. Learning analytics, data mining and data science provide diverse statistical and computational approaches to analyzing data. In this work, we describe Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA), a network analysis technique used by a growing community of researchers to support thick descriptions based on large volumes of data. ENA is based on the theory of epistemic frames. The theory of epistemic frames models the ways of being, thinking and acting inside some community of practice. In this research, we focus on the epistemic frame of software engineering and discuss the elements of this frame: the knowledge, the set of skills and values and the set of processes for making and justifying decisions. We coded the discourses of two well-known open source projects, LibreOffice and OpenOffice, and we used the online tool ENA WebKit to analyze the coded rows of the discourses, but also to visualize and compare the networks of different units of data. We conducted three types of experiments and comparisons on the mean networks of the two projects, on the networks of the different bugs, as well as on the networks of some software engineers who participated in the discussions, and we came to conclusions about how epistemic these dialogues were and therefore assessing their educational value. This is an introductory work utilizing the ENA method for OSS discourse analysis. We believe that the rational presented in this paper can lead to a set of processes on evaluating OSS projects based on their epistemology and at the same time, become an educational tool for software engineering courses and research groups.

This paper contributes to the identification and testing of factors important for the success of open source software (OSS) projects. We present an analysis of OSS communities as virtual organisations, and apply Katzy and Crowston's competency rallying (CR) theory to the case of OSS development projects. CR theory suggests that project participants must develop necessary competencies, identify and understand market opportunities, marshal competencies to meet the opportunity and manage a short-term co-operative process. Using data collected from 7477 OSS projects hosted by the SourceForge system, we formulate and test a set of specific hypotheses derived from CR theory. The empirical data analysis supports the majority of these hypotheses, suggesting that CR theory provides a useful lens for studying OSS projects.

Context: Several Open Source Software (OSS) projects have adopted frequent releases as a strategy to deliver both new features and fixed bugs on time. This cycle begins with express requests from the project’s community, registered as issues in bug repositories by active users and developers. Each OSS project has its own priorities established by their respective communities. A a still open question is the set of criteria and priorities that influence the decisions of which issues should be analyzed, implemented/solved and delivered in next releases. In this paper, we present an exploratory study whose goal is to investigate the influence of target product quality attributes in software evolution practices of OSS projects. The goal is to search for evidence of relationships between these target attributes, priorities assigned to the registered issues and the ways they are delivered by product releases. To this end, we asked six participants of an exploratory study to identify these attributes through the data analysis of repositories of three well-known OSS projects: Libre Office, Eclipse and Mozilla Firefox. Evidence indicated by the participants suggest that OSS community developers use criteria/priorities driven by specific software product quality attributes, to plan and integrate software releases.