No.099 Towards Engineering Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Ecosystems for Impact and Sustainability

Icon

NII Shonan Meeting Seminar 099

Organizers

Brian Fitzgerald, University of Limerick, Ireland
Audris Mockus, University of Tennessee, USA
Minghui Zhou, Peking University, China

Participants

The following participants have confirmed (this list will be updated regularly)

  • Brian Fitzgerald, Lero / University of Limerick
  • Audris Mockus, University of Tennessee
  • Minghui Zhou, Peking University
  • Hadj Bourdoucen, Sultan Qaboos University
  • Danese Cooper, PayPal
  • Daniel M. German, University of Victoria
  • Georgios Gousios, TU Delft EWI
  • James Herbsleb, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Raula Gaikovina Kula,  Nara Institute of Science and Technology
  • Rossi Matti, Aalto University
  • Meyappan Nagappan, University of Waterloo
  • Nicolas Jullien, IMT Atlantique
  • Dirk Riehle, Friedrich-Alexander University
  • Gregorio Robles, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
  • Barbara Russo, University of Bolzano
  • Sean Goggins, University of Missouri
  • Jodi Schneider, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Klaas-Jan Stol, Lero / University of Limerick
  • Bogdan Vasilescu, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Xin Xia, Zhejiang University

Schedule

The tentative schedule of the Shonan Seminar “Towards Engineering Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Ecosystems for Impact and Sustainability” is as follows:

Overview

Free/libre open source ecosystems such as the Linux kernel, have had a tremendous impact on computing and society and have captured the attention of businesses, researchers, and policy makers. Millions of participants, from independent volunteers to those representing companies or government organizations, have created and maintain massive numbers of software projects, ranging from individual scratch space or classroom assignments, to critical infrastructure projects such as the Linux Kernel, OpenStack, Docker or Android.

The spectrum and scale of FLOSS has substantially expanded in recent years, as has its popularity. The combination of distributed version control and social media features have created “transparent” environments that facilitate the scaling up of the ecosystems to millions of repositories and developers [1]. Despite the substantial amount of research on FLOSS in disciplines such as software development, organizational science, management, and social sciences, it remains unclear how and why FLOSS ecosystems form, how they achieve their impact, or how they sustain themselves. The open nature of these communities and the associated vast collections of operational data represent a tantalizing possibility to discover the mechanisms by which such ecosystems form and operate. Achieving such understanding would inform approaches to structuring future open source communities, and could reveal ways to nudge the behavior of individuals and groups involved towards greater sustainability of FLOSS ecosystems.

Research on FLOSS phenomena has been ongoing for almost two decades. From an economic perspective, the most common topics involve motivation and organization: Why do the participants in FLOSS contribute without material compensation usually, and how do such apparently unstructured and distributed organizations survive and succeed? Early research focused on understanding the nature of FLOSS development practice and the reasons underpinning FLOSS success [2], the study of user innovation [3], and the motivation of participants [4, 5]. A great deal of effort has been devoted to investigating communities, e.g., the strategies and processes by which newcomers join [6].

The nature of group and ecosystem sustainability has also been investigated. For example, how a sustainable group evolves [7], how online communities should encourage commitment [8], how successful FLOSS project participants progressively enroll a network of human and material allies to sup- port their efforts [9], how the congruence of values between the individual and their organization affects turnover [10], and what impact the initial willingness and project environment have on newcomers’ long term participation [11, 12].

As commercial participation in FLOSS has become common, the question of how to combine FLOSS practice with commercial practice has received more attention. For example, how the new phenomenon (OSS 2.0) is significantly different from its FLOSS antecedent is discussed in [13]. Borrowing FLOSS style project structure, many organizations are embracing a global sourcing strategy which has been termed opensourcing [14]. Successful hybrid projects have been studied to help understand how to improve upon existing software development practice. The motivation of commercial participation has also been extensively studied, see, e.g., [15, 16, 17, 18]. Various business strategies have been identified and analyzed in, e.g., [19, 20, 21, 22]. The study of the impact that commercial participation has on communities is also being studied currently [23, 24]. The FLOSS phenomenon has also served as a proof-of-concept which has led to interest in initiatives such as inner source [25] and crowdsourcing [26].

This proposed Shonan meeting will bring together a blend of established and young researchers
involved in studying the FLOSS phenomenon from software engineering, human computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, data mining, cognitive science, psychology, operations research, organization management, and complex systems domains. Industry practitioners with experience in various FLOSS aspects will also be included. The participants will discuss fundamental questions that are related to the impact and sustainability of FLOSS ecosystems. More specifically, the meeting will have the following sessions:

  1. How does an ecosystem form? How do different stakeholders work together to form a community that develop and maintain valuable and freely available software, and how does an ecosystem with millions of repositories and developers operate given the lack of centralized planning.
  2. How is the ecosystem organized? How do the teams cooperate to resolve the issues (workflow), and what are the typical relationships between the code and the team.
  3. How does the ecosystem evolve in response to the environment as technology and needs evolve over time?
  4. What distinguishes ecosystems that sustain themselves from ecosystems that disappear? How can an ecosystem be sustained? Under what circumstances should it be sustained?
  5. How do the newcomers learn the protocols and practices of an ecosystem? How would they sustain the ecosystem? What is the relationship between people sustainability and ecosystem sustainability?
  6. What kinds of research methods might be utilized (e.g., what qualitative and quantitative methods)
    to achieve research goals?

The expected outcome of the meeting is to achieved the following:

  • Have provided an opportunity for the established and upcoming researchers and leading practitioners to exchange the ideas in the process of defining the agenda for FLOSS sustainability.
  • Have framed the most critical research questions related to FLOSS ecosystem sustainability and impact.
  • Determined the most relevant theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches to achieve research goals.
  • Have made substantial progress towards identifying actions that would help sustain FLOSS ecosystems and reduce risks to the critical FLOSS infrastructure.

References:

  1. J. Herbsleb, C. Kästner, and C. Bogart, “Intelligently transparent software ecosystems,” IEEE Software, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 89–96, Jan 2016.
  2. A. Mockus, R. F. Fielding, and J. Herbsleb, “A case study of open source development: The
    Apache server,” in 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, June 4-11 2000, pp. 263–272. [Online]. Available: http://dl.acm.org/authorize?2580
  3. E. von Hippel and G. von Krogh, “Open source software and the private-collective innovation model: Issues for organization science,” Organization Science, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 209–223, March/April 2003.
  4. G. von Krogh, S. Haefliger, S. Spaeth, and M. Wallin, “Open source software: What we know (and do not know) about motivations to contribute,” DRUID Conference 2008, the University of Gothen- burg research seminar, and the Open and User Innovation Workshop 2008 at Harvard Business School, 2008.
  5. J. A. Roberts, I.-H. Hann, and S. A. Slaughter, “Understanding the motivations, participation, and performance of open source software developers: A longitudinal study of the apache projects,” Management Science, vol. 52, no. 7, pp. 984–999, July 2006.
  6. G. von Krogh, S. Spaeth, and K. R. Lakhani, “Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study,” Research Policy, vol. 32, no. 7, pp. 1217–1241, July 2003.
  7. S. O’Mahony and F. Ferraro, “The emergence of governance in an open source community,”
    Academy of Management Journal, vol. 50, no. 5, pp. 1079–1106, Oct 1 2007.
  8. R. E. Kraut and P. Resnick, Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
  9. N. Ducheneaut, “Socialization in an open source software community: A socio-technical analysis,” Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Work, vol. 32, pp. 323–368, 2005.
  10. B. J. Hoffman and D. J. Woehr, “A quantitative review of the relationship between personorganiza- tion fit and behavioral outcomes,” Journal of Vocational Behavior, vol. 68, no. 3, pp. 389 – 399, 2006. [Online]. Available: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000187910500103X
  11. M. Zhou and A. Mockus, “Does the initial environment impact the future of developers?” in ICSE 2011, Honolulu, Hawaii, May 21–28 2011, pp. 271–280. [Online]. Available: http://dl.acm.org/authorize?414944
  12. M. Zhou and A. Mockus, “Who will stay in the floss community? modeling participant’s initial behavior,” Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 82–99, Jan 2015.
  13. B. Fitzgerald, “The transformation of open source software,” MIS Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 587–598, Sep., 2006.
  14. P. J. Agerfalk and B. Fitzgerald, “Outsourcing to an unknown workforce: exploring opensourcing as a global sourcing strategy,” MIS Q., vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 385–409, Jun. 2008. [Online]. Available: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2017366.2017375
  15. A. Bonaccorsi and C. Rossi, “Comparing motivations of individual programmers and firms to take part in the open source movement: From community to business,” Knowledge, Technology, and Policy, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 40–64, 2006.
  16. K. Crowston, K. Wei, J. Howison, and A. Wiggins, “Free/libre open source software development: What we know and what we do not know,” ACM Computing Surveys, vol. 44, 02/2012 2012.
  17. P. Capek, S. Frank, S. Gerdt, and D. Shields, “A history of IBM’s open-source involvement and strategy,” IBM Systems Journal, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 249–257, 2005.
  18. J. Henkel, “Selective revealing in open innovation processes: The case of embedded linux,” Re- search Policy, vol. 35, pp. 953–969, 2006.
  19. A. Bonaccorsi, S. Giannangeli, and C. Rossi, “Entry strategies under competing standards: Hybrid business models in the open source software industry,” Management Science, vol. 52, no. 7, pp. 1085–1098, July 2006.
  20. N. Munga, T. Fogwill, and Q. Williams, “The adoption of open source software in business models: a red hat and ibm case study,” in The 2009 Annual Research Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists, October 2009.
  21. L. Dahlander and M. Magnusson, “How do firms make use of open source communities?” Long Range Planning, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 629 – 649, 2008. [Online]. Available: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0024630108000836
  22. P. Wagstrom, J. Herbsleb, R. Kraut, and A. Mockus, “The impact of commercial organizations on volunteer participation in an online community,” in Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Montreal, CA, August 6-10 2010.
  23. X. Ma, M. Zhou, and D. Riehle, “How commercial involvement affects open source projects: three case studies on issue reporting,” Science China Information Sciences, vol. 56, no. 8, pp. 1–13, 2013.
  24. M. Zhou, A. Mockus, X. Ma, L. Zhang, and H. Mei, “Inflow and retention in oss communities with commercial involvement: A case study of three hybrids,” ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), March 2016
  25. K. Stol, P. Avgeriou, M. Babar, Y. Lucas, and B. Fitzgerald, “Key factors for adopting inner source,” ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, vol. 23, no. 2.
  26. K. Stol and B. Fitzgerald, “Two’s company, threes a crowd: a case study of crowdsourcing software development,” in Proc. International Conference on Software Engineering, 2014.