Open Source Development Communities Research Articles

CHOIRBM: An R package for exploratory data analysis and interactive visualization of pain patient body map data.

Body maps are commonly used to capture the location of a patient’s pain and thus reflect the extent of pain throughout the body. With increasing electronic capture body map information, there is an emerging need for clinic- and research-ready tools capable of visualizing this data on individual and mass scales. Here we propose CHOIRBM, an extensible and modular R package and companion web application built on the grammar of graphics system. CHOIRBM provides functions that simplify the process of analyzing and plotting patient body map data integrated from the CHOIR Body Map (CBM) at both individual patient and large-dataset levels. CHOIRBM is built on the popular R graphics package, ggplot2, which facilitates further development and addition of functionality by the open-source development community as future requirements arise. The CHOIRBM package is distributed under the terms of the MIT license and is available on CRAN. The development version of the package with the latest functions may be installed from GitHub. Example analysis using CHOIRBM demonstrates the functionality of the modular R package and highlights both the clinical and research utility of efficiently producing CBM visualizations.

On the fulfillment of coordination requirements in open-source software projects: An exploratory study

In large-scale open-source software projects, where developers are often distributed across the entire planet, coordination among developers is crucial. To estimate whether a state of socio-technical congruence is achieved, which is associated with software quality and project success, we assess the alignment of collaboration and communication in such software projects in terms of coordination requirements. By means of an empirical study on a substantial set of large-scale open-source software projects—the development histories of all projects sum up to over 180 years—we aim at shedding light on this issue. To this end, to take a more semantic view on this phenomenon in comparison to previous work, we do not only identify coordination requirements arising from files and functions only, but also those arising from features. We found that open-source developers fulfill coordination requirements intentionally, but mostly those coordination requirements that arise from coupled source-code artifacts, while they resolve simpler ones independently. Furthermore, neither of the considered abstraction levels of source-code artifacts (files, functions, features) is more suitable to construct coordination requirements with respect to their fulfillment. This finding strongly indicates that features do not play an as important role in the development process as expected and commonly believed by the research community in the area of feature-oriented and feature-driven development. Finally, we identified notable evolutionary trends in the fulfillment of coordination requirements and showed that far-reaching social events (such as organizational issues) have a huge impact on their fulfillment, both negatively and positively. The key findings of our empirical study are that socio-technical relations are important to understand open-source development communities and that the incorporation of different abstraction levels for developer collaboration does yield important insights to further improve the evolution in open-source software projects.

Scedar: A scalable Python package for single-cell RNA-seq exploratory data analysis.

In single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) experiments, the number of individual cells has increased exponentially, and the sequencing depth of each cell has decreased significantly. As a result, analyzing scRNA-seq data requires extensive considerations of program efficiency and method selection. In order to reduce the complexity of scRNA-seq data analysis, we present scedar, a scalable Python package for scRNA-seq exploratory data analysis. The package provides a convenient and reliable interface for performing visualization, imputation of gene dropouts, detection of rare transcriptomic profiles, and clustering on large-scale scRNA-seq datasets. The analytical methods are efficient, and they also do not assume that the data follow certain statistical distributions. The package is extensible and modular, which would facilitate the further development of functionalities for future requirements with the open-source development community. The scedar package is distributed under the terms of the MIT license at https://pypi.org/project/scedar.

Imaginaries and Crystallization Processes in Bitcoin Infrastructuring

Imaginaries is a concept from Neumann and Star that signifies ‘points of understanding’ of the various stakeholder visions of an infrastructuring project. Stakeholders use imaginaries to negotiate their differences and identify shared visions. The ways in which these stakeholders negotiate these differences to agree on concrete artifacts and practices is known as crystallization. However, the CSCW literature has not studied crystallization in detail. Our case study examines imaginaries and crystallization within the infrastructuring of Bitcoin, an open source digital currency and payment platform that is the first of emerging forms of peer-to-peer computer networks facilitating digital transactions. We conducted participant observation of two Bitcoin conferences held in December 2015. Each conference lasted between two to three days, amounting to 40 hours of observation. In these conferences, we examined Bitcoin infrastructuring taking place across different contexts, including open source development and startup communities. Each of these contexts contains pre-existing infrastructures along with powerful gatekeepers (e.g., software committers and financial regulators) who maintain its system of practices and artifacts. The Bitcoin actors, including open source developers and entrepreneurs, make use of imaginaries to identify differences among them, negotiate, and reach points of crystallization in order to integrate with these infrastructures. Based on these findings, we contribute the concept of imaginaries branching and discuss roles of imaginaries in an expansive infrastructuring work interacting with multiple installed bases, some of which also introduce practical limits to the imagined information system.

Use of Docker for deployment and testing of astronomy software

Abstract We describe preliminary investigations of using Docker for the deployment and testing of astronomy software. Docker is a relatively new containerization technology that is developing rapidly and being adopted across a range of domains. It is based upon virtualization at operating system level, which presents many advantages in comparison to the more traditional hardware virtualization that underpins most cloud computing infrastructure today. A particular strength of Docker is its simple format for describing and managing software containers, which has benefits for software developers, system administrators and end users. We report on our experiences from two projects – a simple activity to demonstrate how Docker works, and a more elaborate set of services that demonstrates more of its capabilities and what they can achieve within an astronomical context – and include an account of how we solved problems through interaction with Docker’s very active open source development community, which is currently the key to the most effective use of this rapidly-changing technology.

ODMA: a novel swarm-evolutionary metaheuristic optimizer inspired by open source development model and communities

In these recent years, several metaheuristic optimization algorithms have been developed to solve complex real-world problems. However, according to the no free lunch theorem, there is no metaheuristic algorithm which has the best suited for solving all optimization problems. Therefore, developing new metaheuristic algorithms is an open problem. Two major categories of metaheuristics are swarm intelligence and evolutionary algorithms. Both of them have their own advantages. In this paper, we present a naturally swarm and evolutionary algorithm in which its particles have memory, collaboration, information sharing, and competition inherited from one specific analogy. So, it has the advantages of both swarm and evolutionary algorithms without complications of hybridizing them. We formulate a new metaheuristic optimization algorithm called open source development model algorithm (ODMA) inspired by open source development model and communities, in such a way that each potential solution is considered as a software, and by evolution of the softwares, better solutions of the function that should be optimized are searched. The main operations of the algorithm include employing features and methods of leading softwares, evolution of leading softwares based on their history and forking from leading softwares. After a detailed formulation and explanation of its implementation, the algorithm is evaluated by $$17$$17 well-known benchmark functions, and the results are compared with PSO, ICA, and GA. The results show that ODMA outperforms GA, PSO, and ICA in terms of finding the global optimum and convergence.

The uneasy role of trade marks in free and open source software: you can share my code, but you can't share my brand

At first blush, a trade mark for free and open source software (FOSS) is no different from any other trade mark. A trade mark for open source software can be misused like any other trade mark and enforcement against infringers is a necessary task. What is different, however, is the reaction of those against whom enforcement might be sought. Because of the collaborative nature of much open source software development and its culture of sharing, efforts to restrict how a trade mark may be used can meet with resistance, sometimes even challenged on the basis that trade mark enforcement is contrary to the open source licence under which the software is distributed. This article will discuss enforcement of FOSS trade marks, examining both open source copyright licences and trade mark law principles. In furtherance of the collaborative nature of open source code development and use, however, a trade mark owner for an open source software project may also want others to use its mark. This article will also discuss trade mark licensing law principles including when the sharing goes too far, putting trade mark rights at risk of loss. Part I of the article will give a short background on the open source development model, both technical and community aspects. Part II of the article will review the legal aspects of trade mark use for FOSS projects.

A systematic review of research on open source software in commercial software product development

Context The popularity of the open source software development in the last decade, has brought about an increased interest from the industry on how to use open source components, participate in the open source community, build business models around this type of software development, and learn more about open source development methodologies. There is a need to understand the results of research in this area. Objective Since there is a need to understand conducted research, the aim of this study is to summarize the findings of research that has ben carried out on usage of open source components and development methodologies by the industry, as well as companies’ participation in the open source community. Method Systematic review through searches in library databases and manual identification of articles from the open source conference. The search was first carried out in May 2009 and then once again in May 2010. Results In 2009, 237 articles were first found, from which 19 were selected based on content and quality, and in 2010, 76 new articles were found from which four were selected. Twenty three articles were identified in total. Conclusions The articles could be divided into four categories: open source as part of component based software engineering, business models with open source in commercial organization, company participation in open source development communities, and usage of open source processes within a company.

Managing a corporate open source software asset

Introduction We define corporate open source (COS) as applying the precepts and methodologies prevalent in the open source development community for creating industrial-strength software projects in a corporation for internal use. It may seem that open source style development - using informal processes, voluntary assignment to tasks, and having few financial incentives - may not be a good match for commercial environments. Our ongoing work, however, demonstrates that under the right circumstances, corporations can benefit from open source development techniques. We present two approaches to managing COS projects, and expand in detail on one of them. Our results indicate that open source approaches require significant adaptation to succeed in commercial settings. In particular, they require substantial support from business divisions within a corporation to successfully leverage the shared asset. Our ongoing research has attempted to determine whether corporations can effectively leverage the open source development model to create and manage software projects inside the corporate domain. We have observed how the precepts and methodologies of the open source development had to be adapted in order to create commercial grade software. In particular changes are required in order to accommodate a market-driven schedule and feature decisions that are not wholly amenable to an open source development approach. Our contributions in this article include describing two methods to effectively manage COS assets: an Infrastructure-based COS model, and a Project-specific COS model. We report experiences with the management aspects of the latter COS model, which includes our findings that this model requires a greater amount of support to get a new business division onboard when compared to the minimal support provided by traditional open source projects. However, the benefits of Project-specific COS outweigh the costs once the business division is fully on-board: the development costs are amortized over the number of divisions using the common asset, and the asset itself benefits from contributions from the expanded use. Open source practices and tools have proven potential to overcome many of the well-known difficulties of geographically distributed software development, and to allow widely distributed users of software to add features and functionality they want with a minimum of conflict and management overhead. Dinkelacker et al. discuss Progressive Open Source as a set of tools and techniques for a corporation to host multiple open source projects within a company and between third parties. In the context of their work, our work on COS corresponds to and furthers their work on what is referred to as "Inner Source" in their paper. Our previous work attempted to determine whether open source tools and practices are a good fit for developing commercial-grade software especially in the light of the differences between the two camps: open source development is more iterative in nature when compared to the staged method of software development practiced at many corporations; the incentive structure between the two varies, as does the motivation factor; commercial software is usually characterized by process methodologies (CMMI, ISO, TL9000, among others), that are typically absent in open source development. We reached the conclusion that certain commercial projects can indeed benefit from open source development methodology, especially those projects where: • a technology is needed by several product groups (hence there is reason to pool resources), • the technology is relatively immature so that requirements and features are not fully known at the outset (so there is a need to evolve continuously), • product groups have different needs and specific expertise in customizing the software for their needs (so everyone benefits from the contributions of each group), and • the initial product has a sound, modular architecture (so that it is feasible to merge all the diverse changes into a single development branch). Furthering our previous work, the discussion in this article presents a management view of maintaining a COS asset. We discuss project management and planning aspects that are intrinsic to projects managed in this style.

Correlating temporal communication patterns of the Eclipse open source community with performance and creativity

This paper studies the temporal communication patterns of online communities of developers and users of the open source Eclipse Java development environment. It measures the productivity of each community and seeks to identify correlations that exist between group communication characteristics and productivity attributes. The study uses the TeCFlow (Temporal Communication Flow) visualizer to create movie maps of the knowledge flow by analyzing the publicly accessible Eclipse developer mailing lists as an approximation of the social networks of developers and users. Thirty-three different Eclipse communities discussing development and use of components of Eclipse such as the Java Development Tools, the different platform components, the C/C++ Development Tools and the AspectJ extension have been analyzed over a period of six months. The temporal evolution of social network variables such as betweenness centrality, density, contribution index, and degree have been computed and plotted. Productivity of each development group is measured in terms of two indices, namely performance and creativity. Performance of a group is defined as the ratio of new bugs submitted compared with bugs fixed within the same period of time. Creativity is calculated as a function of new features proposed and implemented. Preliminary results indicate that there is a correlation between attributes of social networks such as density and betweenness centrality and group productivity measures in an open source development community. We also find a positive correlation between changes over time in betweenness centrality and creativity, and a negative correlation between changes in betweenness centrality and performance.

User Collaboration in Open Source Software Development

Open source development is labelled with free source, fast evolution and extensive user collaboration. Previous studies primarily touched on user activities in a few well‐known open source projects but lack the empirical data to represent important issues facing the open source development community. This paper reports on a survey‐based study that investigated user collaboration in open source development. Among the many interesting results, we found open source users themselves to be very experienced software developers. They are highly motivated to make their own contributions, work closely with developers on various tasks, and use electronic communication tools extensively. Users with different development experience and contributing to different category of projects tend to exhibit different motivations and behaviours. These findings confirm the differences between traditional and open source user collaboration and their implications for future open source evolution and management are given and discus...

Open source development and the World Wide Web

The development of the World Wide Web over the course of the past ten years has run rampant. The course it has taken has been both swift and unpredictable. The largest distributed system in the world began as a utopian notion of an interconnected and open web of information, the dream of the academic and intellectual alike. Today it is indeed a massive interconnected web of communication and content, but the content, largely on the more popular, if not pornographic, end of the mass media spectrum, is not what the founders intended.Coinciding with the rapid growth of the web has been the equally speedy rise of the open source development community, which can best be understood as a distributed system in its own right. Indeed, the development of the web has been, outside of the Linux project, the largest arena for open source development. And current trends, witnessed by such significant open source projects as Mozilla and Apache, seem to suggest that the open source way of doing things is quickly becoming the web way of doing things. However, there is a certain tension growing between those who would like to control, for economic profit or for the gratification of control itself, the direction of the web's development and those open source developers who are responsible for a large portion of that growth. This paper explores the natural relationship, as well as the growing tension within this relationship, between the open source development community and the World Wide Web.