Open Source Software Development Communities Research Articles

Knowledge sharing in open-source software development communities: a review and synthesis

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the state of the literature on knowledge sharing in open source software (OSS) development communities by examining the existing research and identifying the knowledge gaps and opportunities that can inform areas for future research. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review was conducted of literature published between January 2011 and February 2023. A total of 24 papers were identified and reviewed. Findings The findings reveal that the literature on knowledge sharing in OSS development communities from developing countries are limited. Additionally, there exists a limited focus on the development of frameworks to support knowledge sharing in OSS communities. The transient nature of OSS development contributors’ results in knowledge loss; thus, knowledge retention needs further investigation. Research limitations/implications This study only included papers whose titles, keywords or abstracts included the search keywords “knowledge sharing” and “Open Source Software”. While the keywords were carefully applied, when applying the search, it cannot be ruled that some relevant studies might have been missed. The study was also limited to conferences and journal papers published in English. Despite the limitations, the study provides a systematic review of knowledge sharing in OSS communities and presents findings that can be useful to researchers and practitioners interested in this area. Originality/value The study provides a systematic literature review of published papers and identifies themes and future research areas on knowledge sharing in OSS communities. Additionally, this review offers insights into future research avenues for theory, content and context on knowledge sharing in OSS development communities.

Improving the detection of community smells through socio‐technical and sentiment analysis

AbstractOpen source software development is regarded as a collaborative activity in which developers interact to build a software product. Such a human collaboration is described as an organized effort of the “social” activity of organizations, individuals, and stakeholders, which can affect the development community and the open source project health. Negative effects of the development community manifest typically in the form of community smells, which represent symptoms of organizational and social issues within the open source software development community that often lead to additional project costs and reduced software quality. Recognizing the advantages of the early detection of potential community smells in a software project, we introduce a novel approach that learns from various community organizational, social, and emotional aspects to provide an automated support for detecting community smells. In particular, our approach learns from a set of interleaving organizational–social and emotional symptoms that characterize the existence of community smell instances in a software project. We build a multi‐label learning model to detect 10 common types of community smells. We use the ensemble classifier chain (ECC) model that transforms multi‐label problems into several single‐label problems, which are solved using genetic programming (GP) to find the optimal detection rules for each smell type. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we conducted an empirical study on a benchmark of 143 open source projects. The statistical tests of our results show that our approach can detect community smells with an average F‐measure of 93%, achieving a better performance compared to different state‐of‐the‐art techniques. Furthermore, we investigate the most influential community‐related metrics to identify each community smell type.

Class Change Prediction by Incorporating Community Smell: An Empirical Study

To adapt to changing software requirements, developers need to maintain and modify software through code changes. Predicting change-prone code can help developers to reduce the cost of software maintenance in advance. Prior work confirmed code smell intensity is a reliable metric for predicting change-prone classes. Community smell is a derivation of the concept of code smell in open-source software development community, it refers to poor communication and collaboration problems among developers. We add community smell to existing change prediction models, and propose a software class change prediction model integrating process metrics, code smell intensity metrics, anti-pattern metrics and community smell metrics, which takes into account the technicality and organizational aspects of software development. Experimental results demonstrate that when Multilayer Perceptron is used to build a change prediction model, community smell improves the baseline model by 4.4% and 31.5% in terms of [Formula: see text]-Measure and Recall. In addition, community smell improves baseline model performance to a greater extent in terms of Recall and Precision than code smell-related information.

Sensible Open Source Licenses For Standards Development Organizations

New technologies such as 5G, IoT, blockchain and many others are implemented as ecosystems with many interoperable products and services designed to communicate seamlessly through a developing web of technical standards. Today’s standards are far more software-driven than in the past. As a result, standards development organizations (SDOs) are increasing their use of open source software (OSS) to promote both the rapid development of new standards and the deployment of standards-conformant products and services in the marketplace. Although SDOs have traditionally avoided requiring the use of any specific software code for conformance to its standards, SDOs have relied on OSS communities to develop tools, test suites, and independent implementations to assist implementers in developing products and services utilizing the standard. Today, however, there is a growing movement for SDOs to initiate their own OSS projects so that the standards and open source development efforts can be better integrated. SDOs understandably seek to replicate the benefits of collaborative development associated with OSS projects. In doing so, SDOs are also selecting the most common OSS licenses for the software they develop through these projects, such as the BSD or Apache licenses. These common licenses are ones that have been certified by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as being compliant with its open source definition (OSD). While OSI does not hold a trademark on the term “open source” nor is it the arbiter of which software is considered OSS, OSI discourages others from referring to software as open source if the applicable software is licensed under a license that does not meet the requirements of the OSD. As OSS has become more commercial, the OSS development community has increasingly formulated OSS licenses that are more tailored to their respective objectives even when those licenses do not satisfy the terms of the OSD. SDOs, however, have not for the most part considered using an OSS license tailored to the intended use of the software being developed nor to their unique goals. Rather, by default, SDOs most often select a common OSI-approved license for their OSS projects. SDOs have long balanced the rights and interests of stakeholders through intellectual property (IP) policies that have permitted their contributors to commit to negotiate licenses for their essential patent claims on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND). While all open source licenses are royalty free, they do not require that the OSS be “patent-free” in the sense that no patent licenses would be required for use of the OSS. Nonetheless, OSI advocates that a RAND licensing commitment from a patent holder is incompatible with OSI’s approved licenses. Some innovators who have committed to license their essential patent claims on RAND terms have raised concerns about the use of OSI-approved licenses for SDO software projects. These innovators are discouraged from participating in such SDOs’ OSS projects because these innovators’ business models are not consistent with OSI’s requirements for unrestricted royalty free licensing. If an SDO’s OSS project becomes fundamental to the way standards are implemented in the marketplace, the lack of participation from these innovators may (i) deprive the community of valuable contributions, and (ii) skew the resulting SDO-approved OSS implementation in a way that is no longer vendor neutral. OSI-approved open source licenses also authorize unrestricted modifications and distribution of the modified software which is antithetical to an SDO’s goal of promoting conformant products and services. If the software can be modified without restriction, then it can be modified in ways that fail to conform to the standard, disrupting the market and thwarting widespread adoption of the standard. The vast majority of SDOs restrict recipients of their specifications, the documents which set forth the requirements of the standard, from making any modifications. Similarly, RAND commitments are made with respect to conforming products and services, not non-conforming ones. It is rather inexplicable then that SDOs are selecting OSI- approved open source licenses that are contrary to their goals of conformance, inconsistent with their existing balanced IP policies, and creating tension among stakeholders. This paper, using real world examples, explores some of the business motivations that have led to the common use of OSI-approved licenses in SDO OSS projects and the challenges created by using those licenses. The paper concludes by offering sample licenses that SDOs may consider that will promote their goals, foster consistency across their standards and software development efforts, and reduce IP-related friction among different stakeholder groups.

QuantityEr: An extensible and simple solution to obtain the amount of results of complex queries to GitHub

GitHub is a platform that provides hosting for software development version control using Git. It features an application programming interface to allow the software to interact with the platform. The enormous quantity of information Hosted in GitHub may be useful to make studies about the current presence of development tools in the open-source software development community. However, the search engine has restrictions that make it impossible to issue complex queries to the platform. In this report, it is described as an object-oriented and extensible solution, named QuantityEr, to obtain the number of search results of complex queries to GitHub by using the inclusion-exclusion principle. The mathematical definitions, as well as related concepts, are presented. The mathematical model is discussed. The application of general design and used development tools are presented. Also, the results of the execution examples are showed. It is concluded that the treated problem has been solved although more work may be done to improve the solution.

Applying participatory action approach to integrating professional librarians into open source software communities

This article theoretically explores how participatory action research might support integration of library professionals into open source software development communities. The author makes a case for the integration of library professionals into open source software communities to help develop better, context-specific, customizable software for use by libraries and advocates for inclusion of library professionals in open source software communities to produce high quality, customizable software. The value of open source software for libraries is discussed and the importance of this integration is articulated by the impacts of this approach. A plan for integration of library professionals into open source software communities is presented.

Trust in Open Source Software Development Communities

This study presents the significance of trust for the formation of an Open Source Software Development (OSSD) community. OSSD has various challenges that must be overcome for its successful operation. First is the development of a community, which requires a healthy community formation environment. Taking into consideration various factors for community formation, a strong sense of TRUST among its members has been felt. Trust development is a slow process with various methods for building and maintaining it. OSSD is teamwork but the team is of unknowns and volunteers. Trust forms a pillar for effective cooperation, which leads to a reduction in conflicts and risks, associated with quality software development. This study offers an overview of various existing trust models, which aids in the development of a trust evaluation framework for OSSD communities. Towards the end of the study, various components of the trust evaluation along with an empirical framework for the same have been proposed.

Organizing for openness: six models for developer involvement in hybrid OSS projects

This article examines organization and governance of commercially influenced Open Source Software development communities by presenting a multiple-case study of six contemporary, hybrid OSS projects. The findings provide in-depth understanding on how to design the participatory nature of the software development process, while understanding the factors that influence the delicate balance of openness, motivations, and governance. The results lay ground for further research on how to organize and manage developer communities where needs of the stakeholders are competing, yet complementary.

How founders’ social capital affects the success of open-source projects: A resource-based view of project teams

Abstract Volunteers under the open-source paradigm organize themselves and coordinate their efforts through the Internet to develop new products and services. Researchers have recognized open-source project founders’ social capital as an important factor to determine the performance of innovations in the open-source software (OSS) context. This study extends previous research by considering the founders’ social capital as a means to create strategic resources of project teams. We use data collected from an OSS development community to identify the role of founders’ social capital in team resource acquisition and utilization. We also clarify its inconsistent effects on innovation performance. From a resource-based view, we find that team size, as a manifestation of human resources, and team brokerage, as a manifestation of organizational resources, are determined by the social capital of project founders, and, in turn, have effects on innovation performance. However, team size and team brokerage contribute differently to innovation performance. The findings enrich our understanding of the impact of founders’ social capital in OSS communities and provide OSS project leaders and firm managers with guidelines on boosting their chances for successful projects.

Collaboration in OSS Communities: Who Solves Whose Problems?

In open collaboration, an economically important form of organizing technology development in online communities, both producers and users, either firm or independent users, invest their resources to develop and share technological problems as well as solutions freely accessible to the public. Existing literature draws ambivalent conclusions about whether and how the different actors engage in joint problem solving. Given potential conflicts of interest and variance in problem types, in terms of who shares the problem and how much generative efforts a problem demands, we know little about the role and nature of joint problem solving in open collaboration. Taking a dynamic view towards knowledge collaboration, this paper uses granular data about problem solving in OpenStack, a large and successful open source software development community, to examine joint problem solving in open collaboration. We show that not all problem types channel participation in the same way. Both producers and users prefer firm user problems. Secondarily, they also focus more on generative problems unless they are independent users. Our findings contribute to the theoretical puzzle about whether and when open collaboration is actually about “collaboration” and informs managers about opportunities for greater joint problem solving.

Challenges & Opportunities Concerning Corporate Formation, Nonprofit Status, & Governance for Open Source Projects

This report addresses a number of key considerations that those managing open source software development initiatives should take into account when thinking about structure, organization, and governance. The genesis of this project involved an investigation into anecdotal reports that companies and other institutions developing open source software were facing difficulties obtaining tax exempt nonprofit status under Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. Based on conversations with a number of constituents in the open source software development community, the authors have prepared this report to address specific questions about nonprofit status alongside questions about corporate formation and governance models more generally. Nothing in this report should be viewed as a substitute for specific legal advice on the narrow questions facing particular organizations under particular sets of factual circumstances. But, the authors are hopeful the document provides a general overview of the complex issues that open source initiatives face when balancing a need for structure and continuity with the innovative and experimental spirit at the heart of many open source development projects. The report has two primary parts: • First, it addresses some formal organizational considerations that open source software initiatives should weigh, evaluating the benefits of taking on a formal structure and the options for doing so. The report provides information about different types of corporate organization that open source projects may wish to consider. And, it delves into Internal Revenue Service policy and practice and US tax law concerning questions about the tax exemptions referenced above. • In its second half, the authors pull back to consider more broadly questions of organizational structure, offering ideas about governance models that open source organizations may wish to explore, separate from formal corporate structure, as they seek to achieve their missions. Different considerations may inform the choice of formal, legal organizational structures (on the one hand) and governance models (on the other hand). By addressing both, the authors hope that this report will be useful to the broadest possible range of managers of and contributors to open source development initiatives.

Developer Role Evolution in Open Source Software Ecosystem: An Explanatory Study on GNOME

An open source software (OSS) ecosystem refers to an OSS development community composed of many software projects and developers contributing to these projects. The projects and developers co-evolve in an ecosystem. To keep healthy evolution of such OSS ecosystems, there is a need of attracting and retaining developers, particularly project leaders and core developers who have major impact on the project and the whole team. Therefore, it is important to figure out the factors that influence developers’ chance to evolve into project leaders and core developers. To identify such factors, we conducted a case study on the GNOME ecosystem. First, we collected indicators reflecting developers’ subjective willingness to contribute to the project and the project environment that they stay in. Second, we calculated such indicators based on the GNOME dataset. Then, we fitted logistic regression models by taking as independent variables the resulting indicators after eliminating the most collinear ones, and taking as a dependent variable the future developer role (the core developer or project leader). The results showed that part of such indicators (e.g., the total number of projects that a developer joined) of subjective willingness and project environment significantly influenced the developers’ chance to evolve into core developers and project leaders. With different validation methods, our obtained model performs well on predicting developmental core developers, resulting in stable prediction performance (0.770, F-value).

오픈소스 개발 커뮤니티 참여자들의 지속적 지식기여 의도에 관한 연구

오픈소스 소프트웨어는 그 자체의 혁신성으로 인해 차별화되며, 혁신성의 원천은 기술적인 문제를 공유하여 함께 해결하는 것에서 비롯된다. 본 연구에서는 오픈소스 개발자들의 자발적 참여와 협력이 지속적인 참여에 미치는 영향을 분석하였고, 이러한 상관관계를 조직시민행동이론과 사회적 자본 이론을 결합하여 살펴보았다. 본 연구는 Bolino et al.(2002)의 조직시민행동과 사회적 자본의 연관성 연구, Wasko and Faraj(2005)의 사회적 자본과 지식기여의 연관성 연구를 토대로 연구모형 및 연구가설을 설정하였다. 오픈소스 개발자 152명을 대상으로 설문을 실시하고, 구조방정식을 통하여 가설을 검증하였다. 분석 결과, 조직시민행동의 충성, 사회적 참여, 변화주도적 참여가 사회적 자본을 축적하는 것으로 나타났고, 사회적 자본의 상호호혜성과 공유 비전은 지속적 지식기여 의도를 강화하는 것으로 나타났다. 그러나 사회적 참여와 공유 비전, 응집성과 지속적 지식기여 의도 간의 관계는 유의하지 않은 것으로 나타났다.

A Study on Maturity Model of Open Source Software Community to Estimate the Quality of Products

Open Source Software (OSS) is a new paradigm to develop software by community, in which groups of developer collaborating each other. The method becomes very popular because the products of OSS projects, such as source code, documents, results of tests, are published by open-license. One of noticeable features of OSS is openness of project. Anyone can access the products of OSS projects. It is expected that the quality of products could be higher than those developed by conventional methods, as more people access OSS products and the chance to find defect could be larger. However, there are no established methods for the evaluation of OSS, neither actual terms of the evaluation of OSS. We propose an evaluation method, which is based on the maturity model of OSS development community.

Research Note—Continued Participation in Online Innovation Communities: Does Community Response Matter Equally for Everyone?

In this study, we focus on the factors that influence online innovation community members' continued participation in the context of open source software development (OSSD) communities. Prior research on continued participation in online communities has primarily focused on social interactions among members and benefits obtained from these interactions. However, members of these communities often play different roles, which have been examined extensively, albeit in a separate stream of research. This study attempts to bridge these two streams of research by investigating the joint influence of community response and members' roles on continued participation. We categorize OSSD community members into users and modifiers and empirically examine the differential effects of community response across these roles. By analyzing a longitudinal data set of activities in the discussion forums of more than 300 OSSD projects, we not only confirm the positive influence of community response on members' continued participation but also find that community response is more influential in driving the continuance behavior of users than that of modifiers. In addition, this research highlights the importance of modifiers, a key subgroup of OSSD participants that has been largely overlooked by prior research.

Effect of external events on newcomer participation in open source online communities

Newcomer participation is a strong determinant of the success of online communities, particularly of open source software (OSS) development communities. Most research on newcomer participation in online communities so far has been limited to understanding the socialization experiences of participants once they join a community. No study we are aware of has looked at the role of factors external to a community itself in determining participation levels. We argue that it is important to understand external factors to delineate accurate reasons for decline or growth of participation in a community. In this study, we investigate the effect of company announcements made by OSS steward firms, events which are external to a community, on participation in newcomer communities associated with the OSS. We studied activity in two communities, a Java newcomer forum and a MySQL newcomer forum, around two announcements that affected each community. We found evidence that company announcements had a substantial effect and participation either increased or decreased. Through analysis of secondary sources we conjecture that announcements indirect shape participation by influencing newcomer motivation. Announcements perceived as hostile to open source values have a significant negative effect on participation, whereas announcements perceived as friendly either significantly increase participation or have no significant effect.

Key Processes Enabling Designers to Design with a Community:Nomothetic Research on Design Implementation in Open Source Software Development Communities

Key Processes Enabling Designers to Design with a Community:Nomothetic Research on Design Implementation in Open Source Software Development Communities

A structure for innovation reproduction in the Eclipse OSS ecosystem

In Open Source Software (OSS) development community supported by spontaneous volunteers, technical capabilities, hunger for fame and the satisfaction of contribution are said to be motivating factor for participation. In that community, vendors always play auxiliary roles, and integrate the result of OSS into their business activities. However, in the Eclipse OSS community, the main role of OSS development activities is taken over by vendors. The relationship between individuals and vendors is reversed. Therefore, it becomes important to maintain the motivation of the development community, promote innovation and link the activities to the profit of vendors. In other words, management of co-creation and competition are being conducted at the same time. This paper tries to clarify internal and external structures in an OSS ecosystem led by vendors considering the Eclipse community as one particular case. Also it constructs a co-creation model to promote sustainable development for an OSS ecosystem.

Collective Intelligence Systems: Classification and Modeling

Collective intelligence (CI) is an emerging research field that seeks to merge human and machine intelligence, with an aim to achieve results unattainable by either one of these entities alone. CI systems may significantly vary in nature, from collaborative systems, like open source software development communities, to competitive ones, like problem-solving companies that benefit from the competition among participating user teams to identify solutions to various R&D problems. The advantages that CI systems earn user communities, together with the fact that they share a number of basic common features, provide the potential for designing a general methodology for their efficient modeling, development and evaluation. In this paper we describe a modeling process which identifies the common features, as well as the main challenges that the construction of generic collective intelligence systems poses. First a basic categorization of CI systems is performed, followed by a description of the proposed modeling approach. This approach includes concepts such as the set of possible user actions, the CI system state and the individual and community objectives, as well as a number of necessary functions, which estimate various parameters of the CI system, such as the expected user actions, the future system state and the level of objective fulfillment. Finally, based on the proposed modeling approach, certain current CI systems are described, a number of problems that they face are identified and specific solutions are suggested. The proposed modeling approach is expected to promote more efficient CI system design, so that the benefit gained by the participating community and individuals, will be maximized.

The State and Profile of Open Source Software Projects in health and medical informatics

Purpose Little has been published about the application profiles and development patterns of open source software (OSS) in health and medical informatics. This study explores these issues with an analysis of health and medical informatics related OSS projects on SourceForge, a large repository of open source projects. Methodology A search was conducted on the SourceForge website during the period from May 1 to 15, 2007, to identify health and medical informatics OSS projects. This search resulted in a sample of 174 projects. A Java-based parser was written to extract data for several of the key variables of each project. Several visually descriptive statistics were generated to analyze the profiles of the OSS projects. Results Many of the projects have sponsors, implying a growing interest in OSS among organizations. Sponsorship, we discovered, has a significant impact on project success metrics. Nearly two-thirds of the projects have a restrictive license type. Restrictive licensing may indicate tighter control over the development process. Our sample includes a wide range of projects that are at various stages of development (status). Projects targeted towards the advanced end user are primarily focused on bio-informatics, data formats, database and medical science applications. Conclusion We conclude that there exists an active and thriving OSS development community that is focusing on health and medical informatics. A wide range of OSS applications are in development, from bio-informatics to hospital information systems. A profile of OSS in health and medical informatics emerges that is distinct and unique to the health care field. Future research can focus on OSS acceptance and diffusion and impact on cost, efficiency and quality of health care.