Open Source Software Development: Minitrack Introduction

Abstract

In its first year, the minitrack on Open Source Software (OSS) Development will provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of a fascinating and increasingly important mode of software development. OSS is a broad term used to embrace software that is developed and released under some sort of “open source” license. There are thousands of OSS projects, spanning a range of applications, operating system (e.g, Linux, BSD), Internet infrastructure (e.g., the Apache Web Server, sendmail, bind), user applications (e.g., the GIMP, OpenOffice), programming languages (e.g., Perl, Python, gcc) and games (e.g., Paradise). A key feature of OSS development is the participation of a community of developers and active users primarily via the Internet. This mode of interaction creates new challenges to software development, as team members work in a distributed environment and often as volunteers rather than employees. The empirical literature on software engineering, programmers and the social and technical aspects of software development suggests that such teams would face insurmountable difficulties in developing code, yet in fact some of these teams have been remarkably successful. Researchers from a variety of disciplines have turned their attention to the phenomenon of OSS as an intriguing and successful form of Internetsupported work. Understanding how these teams work is important because a digital society entails an increased use of Internet-supported distributed teams for a wide range of knowledge work. This minitrack brings together nine papers addressing various aspects of the OSS phenomenon. The minitrack starts with the paper “The Mysteries of Open Source Software: Black and White and Red All Over” by Brian Fitzgerald and Par Agerfalk. This paper offers a general discussion of the OSS concept, noting a number of “contradictions, paradoxes and tensions throughout”. The session continues with two papers discussing community issues in OSS project teams in more detail. The first, “Collaboration, Leadership, Control, and Conflict Negotiation in the Netbeans.org Open Source Software Development Community” by Chris Jensen and Walt Scacchi, examines leadership and control sharing across organizations and individuals, in and between communities, using the Netbeans.org community as an example. The second paper, “Contrasting Community Building in Sponsored and Community Founded Open Source Projects” by Joel West and Siobhan O'Mahony, contrasts the lifecycles of two kinds of OSS projects, community-founded vs. spinouts from an organization, and discusses in particular the problems of building a community in the later case. The second session includes three papers that focus on the internal workings of OSS projects. The first, “Effective work practices for FLOSS development: A model and propositions” by Kevin Crowston, Hala Annabi, James Howison and Chengetai Masango, develops a set of propositions about the performance of FLOSS teams based on Hackman’s model of effectiveness of work teams. The second paper, “Discussion of a Large-Scale Open Source Data Collection Methodology” by Michael Hahsler and Stefan Koch, presents a set of research areas that could be studied by collecting data on a large number of open source software projects from a single project repository. The final paper in the session, “A Preliminary Analysis of the Influences of Licensing and Organizational Sponsorship on Success in Open Source Projects” by Katherine J. Stewart, Anthony P. Ammeter and Likoebe M. Maruping, develops a model of the impact of licensing restrictiveness and organizational sponsorship on the popularity and vitality of open source software (OSS) development projects and tests it using data from Freshmeat.net and OSS project home pages. The final session includes two papers that consider relations between projects. The first of these, “A Topological Analysis of the Open Source Software Development Community” by Jin Xu, Yongqin Gao, Scott Christley and Gregory Madey, uses social network data about SourceForge developers to examine the topology and evolution of the OSS development community. The second, “Shifting the Creative Effort: Knowledge Reuse in Open Source Software Development” by Stefan Haefliger and Sebastian Spaeth, examines the forms and extent of knowledge reuse from a sample of six open source software projects. The final paper in the minitrack, “Exploring Usability Discussions in Open Source Development” by Michael B. Twidale and David M. Nichols, examines bug reports from several projects to characterize how developers address and resolve issues concerning user interface and interaction design. These nine papers provide a cross-section of the current state of the research on Open Source Software development. We thank all authors who submitted papers and the reviewers for their contributions to the mini-track.