Free Software Projects Research Articles

Application of fuzzy Delphi technique to identify analytical lenses for determining the preparation of free and open source software projects for user experience maturity

User eXperience (UX) significantly influences the success of free and open source software (FOSS) projects and is measured using UX capability maturity models (UXCMMs). Every organization desires higher levels of UX maturity; however, it requires upfront preparations and process quality control.Harmonizing processes and analytical lenses for determining preparation for UX maturity are still challenging, and studies to create them are limited. The analysis is ad hoc and based on the actors’ will and experiences. This study proposes and validates analytical lenses.Findings show that UX experts agreed that the lenses could be used with a consensus percentage of 81 %, the threshold value (d) = 0.112, and crisp values greater than α-cut = 0.5. On validation, 47.57 % of stakeholders agreed, and 52.43 % strongly agreed they were relevant. Results help evaluate the status quo and change culture and policies toward ideal preparation. Two areas are suggested for future research.

How app companies use GitHub: on modes of valuation in the digital attention economy

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to political economic debates on the digital economy and software production by attending to the ‘hybridity’ of economic forms in digital markets. It adds to a nascent literature on hybridity by going close to the processes of code-production. Methodologically, we ambitiously combine in-situ ethnography with netnographic observation and qualitative interviews in a thickly multi-situated analysis of Danish proprietary app developers’ use of the code-repository Github commonly associated with free and open source software (F/OSS) projects. By attending to the situated practices of everyday coding within ‘app-centric media,’ we show how proprietary developers engage in hybrid practices that both align, but are also partly at odds with the overarching frame of commercial exchanges in which they operate. We argue that these practices form part of four boundary crossing, salient modes of valuation within Danish app-development, which at once destabilize and maintain traditional boundaries between proprietary and F/OSS code. While our analysis concerns a Danish app economy, it serves to demonstrate how hybridity beyond commercial exchange forms a fundamental part of both software materiality, practices and values within situated digital markets. This, thereby, is crucial to grasping the valuations and mechanisms at work furthering the digital attention economy.

Engagement capstone projects: A collaborative approach to a case study in psychoacoustics.

Undergraduates in Spanish universities conclude their science degrees with a capstone project (CP) where they must apply the knowledge gained during their studies. In recent years, students in technical degrees often postponed this last step due to a fast entry into the labour market or disappointment about the development of their capstone projects. This article presents an approach that tries to overcome these challenges and avoid delays in project submission called Engagement capstone projects. The authors, supported by the French Company EOMYS, manage this educational project in which students become responsible for their contribution to a free and open software project called MOSQITO, which provides sound quality metrics based on psychoacoustics. A framework is provided to ensure involvement in the project by both students and academic/industrial supervisors to help avoid student discouragement. The proposed methodology is compared with the current program and the learning proposal, and the expected outcomes are extensively explained. The experience gathered to date is limited, but the results obtained show the potential application of the proposed Engagement capstone projects as a solution to late CP submission.

Community, Time, and (Con)text: A Dynamical Systems Analysis of Online Communication and Community Health among Open-Source Software Communities.

Free and open‐source software projects have become essential digital infrastructure over the past decade. These projects are largely created and maintained by unpaid volunteers, presenting a potential vulnerability if the projects cannot recruit and retain new volunteers. At the same time, their development on open collaborative development platforms provides a nearly complete record of the community's interactions; this affords the opportunity to study naturally occurring language dynamics at scale and in a context with massive real‐world impact. The present work takes a dynamical systems view of language to understand the ways in which communicative context and community membership shape the emergence and impact of language use—specifically, sentiment and expressions of gratitude. We then present evidence that these language dynamics shape newcomers' likelihood of returning, although the specific impacts of different community responses are crucially modulated by the context of the newcomer's first contact with the community.

Development of a Video Game for Teaching in an Electrical Machine Laboratory

Nowadays, the world has focused on digital media. There have been voices for and against virtual education. Gamification has been described as a strategy to transmit knowledge through the design and use of games. This article describes the first phase of the development of a game aimed at the transmission of knowledge related to engineers dedicated to the commercialization, diagnosis, and repair of induction motors; these are electrical machines widely used in industry. In this way, this paper shows the Electric Motor Store Simulator (hereinafter STME for its acronym in Spanish) is a free software project that aims to develop a game for users to have a closer idea about small businesses. It was developed as a minimum viable product under free software licensing, which allows anyone with the necessary knowledge to expand the functionality by adding or improving modules

TRANSFORMATION OF FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS: GOVERNANCE BETWEEN THE CATHEDRAL AND BAZAAR

ABSTRACT It is common for community-based free software projects to be associated with an organizational scenario that resembles “a bazaar more than a cathedral,” and to differ from the traditional, or ‘bureaucratic’ way of organizing work. This paper analyzes the governance of these organizations from the perspective of their structure and control, considering the development trajectory of three community-based free software projects in Brazil. Results show that the constant need to produce modern technologies gives rise to external pressures that promote change - albeit temporary - in the governance of these projects, making them resemble a cathedral more than a bazaar. Governance does not follow a cycle of sequential improvement; it changes depending on the external organizational actors present, such as sponsors. This suggests the need for strategic and flexible governance to deal with the acquisition and allocation of organizational resources. Governance of the projects described here varies along a spectrum of (in)formality that allows both production models - cathedral or bazaar - to exist in the same organization at different periods.

Organization of Free and Open Source Software Projects: In-between the Community and Traditional Governance

This work aimed to understand what community-based free software projects are and what governance characteristics (structure and control) differentiate them from traditional organizations, thus spurring further reflections on this business model. A literature review was conducted to outline the main perceptions on this topic, as well as qualitative exploratory research, involving documentary analysis and interviews with four Brazilian participants who work in the management of projects.. The exploratory research was a preliminary contact with the investigated field to make the arguments presented more reliable. Among the reflections, it is observed that even though it is possible to distinguish community-based free software projects from traditional organizations, a crucial factor not always considered are the transformations resulting from the development of these projects. It is necessary that the studies consider the context of functioning, as well as the changes and interorganizational relationships established by the projects over time. Considering these issues, it is believed that approximations between projects and traditional organizations can occur, even if community characteristics are maintained.

The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects

Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales. We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies. F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions. In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly.

Talk Is Silver, Code Is Gold? Beyond Traditional Notions of Contribution in Peer Production: The Case of Drupal

Peer production communities are based on the collaboration of communities of people, mediated by the Internet, typically to create digital commons, as in Wikipedia or free software. The contribution activities around the creation of such commons (e.g., source code, articles, or documentation) have been widely explored. However, other types of contribution whose focus is directed toward the community have remained significantly less visible (e.g., the organization of events or mentoring). This work challenges the notion of contribution in peer production through an in-depth qualitative study of a prominent “code-centric” example: the case of the free software project Drupal. Involving the collaboration of more than a million participants, the Drupal project supports nearly 2% of websites worldwide. This research (1) offers empirical evidence of the perception of “community-oriented” activities as contributions, and (2) analyzes their lack of visibility in the digital platforms of collaboration. Therefore, through the exploration of a complex and “code-centric” case, this study aims to broaden our understanding of the notion of contribution in peer production communities, incorporating new kinds of contributions customarily left invisible.

The Waikato Open Source Frameworks (WEKA and MOA) for Machine Learning Techniques

WEKA and MOA are a free open-source software project specific for data mining and data stream mining, respectively. They are written in Java and developed at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. This research paper presents a comprehensive study of both consists of algorithms, evaluation, visualization, correlation between WEKA and MOA, workflow of implementation, and the classification accuracy.

‘Open source has won and lost the war’: Legitimising commercial–communal hybridisation in a FOSS project

Information technology (IT) firms are paying developers in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, leading to the emergence of hybrid forms of work. In order to understand how the firm–project hybridisation process occurs, we present the results of an online survey of participants in the Debian project, as well as interviews with Debian Developers. We find that the intermingling of the commercial logic of the firm and the communal logic of the project requires rhetorical legitimation. We analyse the discourses used to legitimise firm–project cooperation as well as the organisational mechanisms which facilitate this cooperation. A first phase of legitimation, based on firm adoption of open licenses and developer self-fulfilment, aims to erase the commercial/communal divide. A second more recent phase seeks to professionalise work relations inside the project and, in doing so, challenges the social order which restricts participation in FOSS. Ultimately, hybridisation raises the question of the fair distribution of the profits firms derive from FOSS.

Free and Open Source Law, Policy and Practice - 2d Edition: Trademark Chapter

Trademarks play a significant role in the FOSS ecosystem – while copyrights and patents are freely shared in FOSS, trademarks are not. The project’s reputation is at stake if it allows malicious software, software of poor quality, or software that does not function as expected, to be distributed under the same name. Free and open source software projects can, and therefore generally do, exercise their exclusive rights under trademark law. This chapter covers the basics of trademark law as relevant to FOSS projects, the types of goods and services one typically finds associated with FOSS projects, the role of community engagement in trademarks, theories for the lawful use of another’s trademark, and a discussion of various ways a trademark owner might try to undo the FOSS license using trademark law as the vehicle since copyright is largely unavailable.

Does Superposition Influence the Success of FLOSS Projects? An Examination of Open-Source Software Development by Organizations and Individuals

Does the task work orchestration in free (Libre) and open-source (FLOSS) software projects influence the project’s success? Does satisfying the psychological needs of the contributors effectively scale up to the level of the project and manifest as project success? For answers, we developed an innovative approach to operationalize and study the degree to which a project’s task work consisted of sequential layering of individually developed tasks, referred to as "superposed organization of tasks." Using this measure on a large sample of FLOSS projects hosted on GitHub, we found that the degree of superposition exhibited an inverted U-shaped relationship with project success, indicating the presence of an optimal value for the project’s work structures. Further, organizational ownership of projects introduced practices that tended to influence the nature of this relationship. The greater the organization owner was willing to invest in the project by contributing code and employees’ time, the lesser was the overall influence of superposed work structures on the success of the project. The greater the organization owner invested in the support activities of the FLOSS project, greater was the time-cost of money—creating a higher need for efficient development practices in lieu of superposition.

Analyzing and Managing Complex Software Ecosystems: A Framework to Understand Value in Information Systems

Managing complex software ecosystems, such as free open source software projects, is crucial for software-producing organizations. We present a framework that helps visualize complex ecosystem settings, gain insights on value engines, and describe relationships between the ecosystem partners.

Personal and Social Proximity: Shaping Leadership in a Free Software Project

Open software projects are usually portrayed by focusing on charismatic leaders, friendly communities, and meritocratic language. We dig under the surface of this stereotypical picture and analyse the social relationships of the people involved; specifically, whether they are related through personal proximity or they are distant social partners. We contribute to the literature on free/open source innovation in three ways. First, we highlight the continuum of roles played by individual leaders in the open source project, as brokers and/or initiators. Second, we delve deeper in the social networks of the Videolan software community to layout where and how leaders are organised in groups and play the role of brokers and initiators. We study leadership emergence over time by taking into account the context of activities. Finally, we produce a typology of three Videolan communities with specific social networks that evolved over time in terms of leaders and social structure.

Talk is Silver, Code is Gold? Beyond 'Object-Centric' Notions of Contribution in Peer Production

Peer production communities are based on the collaboration of communities of people, mediated by the Internet, typically to create digital commons, as in Wikipedia or free software. The contribution activities around the creation of such commons (e.g. source code, articles or documentation) have been widely explored. However, other types of contribution whose focus of action is directed towards the community have remained significantly less visible (e.g. organisation of events or mentoring). This work challenges the notion of contribution in peer production through an in-depth qualitative study of a prominent “code-centric” example: the case of the free software project Drupal. Throughout the collaboration of more than a million participants, the Drupal project supports more than 2% of websites worldwide. Thus, this research (1) offers empirical evidence of the perception of “community-oriented” activities as contributions, (2) analyses their lack of visibility in the digital platforms of collaboration, and (3) draws on the concept of affective labour to show its relevance for the sustainability of peer production communities. Therefore, through the exploration of a complex and extreme “code-centric” case, this study aims to reconceptualise the notion of contribution in peer production communities, incorporating new kinds of contributions traditionally invisibilised. In this way, this work may open new avenues of research, enabling the study of contribution activities from a new perspective.

The meaning of sharing in free software and beyond

ABSTRACTThis study brings together findings about two contexts of sharing in order to explore the meaning of the word in the digital environment. First, this study is based on ethnographic research of free software projects and uses the resulting thick description to determine the meaning of sharing in this context. Second, the current literature on sharing usually takes user-generated content (UGC) platforms as its empirical reference, resulting in identifying a distinct meaning of sharing in this context. By combining the two sets of findings into a single narrative, this study makes three points: (1) the academic discourse on free software conceptualizing it as a form of gift-giving antithetical to the ways of capitalist production needs to be revised; (2) the use of sharing in the context of UGC platforms relies heavily on references to the culture of free software; (3) although representatives from both contexts claim to be taking part in the same sharing practices, there are substantial differences in the type of information being shared, the explicitness of the sharing mechanisms, and the organizational context of monetization of the shared objects.

Changes in free and open source software licenses: managerial interventions and variations on project attractiveness

The license adopted by an open source software is associated with its success in terms of attractiveness and maintenance of an active ecosystem of users, bug reporters, developers, and sponsors because what can and cannot be done with the software and its derivatives in terms of improvement and market distribution depends on legal terms there specified. By knowing this licensing effect through scientific publications and their experience, project managers became able to act strategically, loosening up the restrictions associated with their source code due to sponsor interests, for example; or the contrary, tightening restrictions up to guarantee source code openness, adhering to the “forever free” strategy. But, have project managers behaved strategically like that, changing their projects license? Up to this paper, we did not know if and what types of changes in these legal allowances project managers have made and, more importantly, whether such managerial interventions are associated with variations in intervened project attractiveness (i.e., related to their numbers of web hits, downloads and members). This paper accomplishes these two goals and demonstrates that: 1) managers of free and open source software projects do change the distribution rights of their source code through a change in the (group of) license(s) adopted; and 2) variations in attractiveness are associated with the strategic choice of a licensing schema. To reach these conclusions, a unique dataset of open source projects that have changed license was assembled in a comparative form, analyzing intervened projects over its monthly periods of different licenses. Based on a sample of more than 3500 active projects over 44 months obtained from the FLOSSmole repository of Sourceforge.net data, 756 projects that had changed their source code distribution allowances and restrictions were identified and analyzed. A dataset on these projects’ type of changes was assembled to enable a descriptive and exploratory analysis of the types of license interventions observed over a period of almost four years anchored on projects’ attractiveness. More than 35 types of interventions were detected. The results indicate that variations in attractiveness after a license intervention are not symmetric; that is, if a change from license schema A to B is beneficial to attractiveness, a change from B to A is not necessarily prejudicial. This and other interesting findings are discussed in detail. In general, the results here reported support the current literature knowledge that the restrictions imposed by the license on the source code distribution are associated with market success vis-a-vis project attractiveness, but they also suggest that the state-of-the-science is superficial in terms of what is known about why these differences in attractiveness can be observed. The complexity of the results indicates to free software managers that no licensing schema should be seen as the right one, and its choice should be carefully made, considering project strategic goals as perceived relevant to stakeholders of the application and its production. These conclusions create awareness of several limitations of our current knowledge, which are discussed along with guidelines to understand them deeper in future research endeavors.

A Theory of Joint Authorship for Free and Open Source Software Projects

It is commonly believed that every contributor to a free and open source software project owns copyright in their incremental contribution to the project, and owns it solely. It is also commonly believed that one must avoid a legal conclusion that the project code is jointly authored—and therefore jointly owned—even though the legal concept of joint authorship is strongly consistent with the social construct of free software. This view is based on a belief that the application of the existing copyright law of joint authorship will undermine the intended operation of the free software license and thus fail to support the goals of the free software movement. This article takes the position that, under U.S. law, joint authorship is a legal framework for copyright ownership in a free and open source software project that presents no greater risk than those risks inherent in the concept of sequential ownership and may even be superior, providing some benefits that are not available under the current commonly-accepted theory of ownership.

Humanitarian Open Source Software in Computing Education

Empowering students to become socially responsible professionals is a desirable result of computing education. Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects provide an opportunity for computing educators to inspire their students to tackle global humanitarian challenges while also learning about software engineering.