Article

Free/open source software development

Author:

Walt ScacchiAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC-FSE '07: Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering

Pages 459 - 468

https://doi.org/10.1145/1287624.1287689

Published: 07 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to review what is known about free and open source software development (FOSSD) work practices, development processes, project and community dynamics, and other socio-technical relationships. It focuses on exploring how FOSS is developed and evolved based on an extensive review of a set of empirical studies of FOSSD projects that articulate different levels of analysis. These characterize what has been analyzed in FOSSD studies across levels that examine (i) why individuals participate; (ii) resources and capabilities supporting development activities; (iii) how cooperation, coordination, and control are realized in projects; (iv) alliance formation and inter-project social networking; (v) FOSS as a multi-project software ecosystem, and (vi) FOSS as a social movement. Next, there is a discussion of limitations and constraints in the FOSSD studies so far. Last, attention shifts to identifying emerging opportunities for future FOSSD studies that can give rise to the development of new software engineering tools or techniques, as well as to new empirical studies of software development.

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Index Terms

Free/open source software development
1. Social and professional topics
2. Software and its engineering

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cover image ACM Conferences

ESEC-FSE '07: Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering

September 2007

638 pages

ISBN:9781595938114

DOI:10.1145/1287624

General Chair:
Ivica Crnkovic
Mälardalen University, Sweden
,
Program Chair:
Antonia Bertolino
ISTI-CNR, Italy

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 September 2007

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