scholarly journals Will You Come Back to Contribute? Investigating the Inactivity of OSS Core Developers in GitHub

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Calefato ◽  
Marco Aurelio Gerosa ◽  
Giuseppe Iaffaldano ◽  
Filippo Lanubile ◽  
Igor Fabio Steinmacher
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
State Transition ◽  
Active State ◽  
State Model ◽  
Novel Method ◽  
To Come ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Individual ◽  
To Receive

Abstract Several Open-Source Software (OSS) projects depend on the continuity of their development communities to remain sustainable. Understanding how developers become inactive or why they take breaks can help communities prevent abandonment and incentivize developers to come back. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify developers’ inactive periods by analyzing the individual rhythm of contributions to the projects. Using this method, we quantitatively analyze the inactivity of core developers in 18 OSS organizations hosted on GitHub. We also survey core developers to receive their feedback about the identified breaks and transitions. Our results show that our method was effective for identifying developers’ breaks. About 94% of the surveyed core developers agreed with our state model of inactivity; 71% and 79% of them acknowledged their breaks and state transition, respectively. We also show that all core developers take breaks (at least once) and about a half of them (~ 45%) have completely disengaged from a project for at least one year. We also analyzed the probability of transitions to/from inactivity and found that developers who pause their activity have a ~ 35 to ~ 55% chance to return to an active state; yet, if the break lasts for a year or longer, then the probability of resuming activities drops to ~ 21–26%, with a ~ 54% chance of complete disengagement. These results may support the creation of policies and mechanisms to make OSS community managers aware of breaks and potential project abandonment.

scholarly journals Knowledge sharing in open source software communities: motivations and management

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-813 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zilia Iskoujina ◽  
Joanne Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Sharing ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Online Communities ◽  
Descriptive Analysis ◽  
Online Questionnaire ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

Purpose – This paper aims to add to the understanding of knowledge sharing in online communities through an investigation of the relationship between individual participant’s motivations and management in open source software (OSS) communities. Drawing on a review of literature concerning knowledge sharing in organisations, the factors that motivate participants to share their knowledge in OSS communities, and the management of such communities, it is hypothesised that the quality of management influences the extent to which the motivations of members actually result in knowledge sharing. Design/methodology/approach – To test the hypothesis, quantitative data were collected through an online questionnaire survey of OSS web developers with the aim of gathering respondents’ opinions concerning knowledge sharing, motivations to share knowledge and satisfaction with the management of OSS projects. Factor analysis, descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and regression analysis were used to explore the survey data. Findings – The analysis of the data reveals that the individual participant’s satisfaction with the management of an OSS project is an important factor influencing the extent of their personal contribution to a community. Originality/value – Little attention has been devoted to understanding the impact of management in OSS communities. Focused on OSS developers specialising in web development, the findings of this paper offer an important original contribution to understanding the connections between individual members’ satisfaction with management and their motivations to contribute to an OSS project. The findings reveal that motivations to share knowledge in online communities are influenced by the quality of management. Consequently, the findings suggest that appropriate management can enhance knowledge sharing in OSS projects and online communities, and organisations more generally.

scholarly journals Securing the wireless emergency alerts system

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (10) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Jihoon Lee ◽  
Gyuhong Lee ◽  
Jinsung Lee ◽  
Youngbin Im ◽  
Max Hollingsworth ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Software Defined Radio ◽  
Severe Weather ◽  
Base Stations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Software Libraries ◽  
Amber Alerts ◽  
Almost All ◽  
To Receive

Modern cell phones are required to receive and display alerts via the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) program, under the mandate of the Warning, Alert, and Response Act of 2006. These alerts include AMBER alerts, severe weather alerts, and (unblockable) Presidential Alerts, intended to inform the public of imminent threats. Recently, a test Presidential Alert was sent to all capable phones in the U.S., prompting concerns about how the underlying WEA protocol could be misused or attacked. In this paper, we investigate the details of this system and develop and demonstrate the first practical spoofing attack on Presidential Alerts, using commercially available hardware and modified open source software. Our attack can be performed using a commercially available software-defined radio, and our modifications to the open source software libraries. We find that with only four malicious portable base stations of a single Watt of transmit power each, almost all of a 50,000-seat stadium can be attacked with a 90% success rate. The real impact of such an attack would, of course, depend on the density of cellphones in range; fake alerts in crowded cities or stadiums could potentially result in cascades of panic. Fixing this problem will require a large collaborative effort between carriers, government stakeholders, and cellphone manufacturers. To seed this effort, we also propose three mitigation solutions to address this threat.

scholarly journals CMS Experience with Adoption of the Community supported DD4hep Toolkit

2020 ◽  
Vol 245 ◽  
pp. 02032
Author(s):  
Carl Vuosalo ◽  
Sunanda Banerjee ◽  
Markus Frank ◽  
Vladimir Ivanchenko ◽  
Sergio Lo Meo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
High Energy Physics ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Software Requirements ◽  
Software Framework ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
To Come ◽  
Performance Results ◽  
Energy Physics

DD4hep is an open-source software toolkit that provides comprehensive and complete generic detector descriptions for high energy physics (HEP) detectors. The Compact Muon Solenoid collaboration (CMS) has recently evaluated and adopted DD4hep to replace its custom detector description software. CMS has demanding software requirements as a very large, longrunning experiment that must support legacy geometries and study many possible upgraded detector designs of a constantly evolving detector that will be taking data for many years to come. CMS has chosen DD4hep since it is a high-quality, community-supported solution that will benefit from continuing modernization and maintenance. This presentation will discuss the issues of DD4hep adoption, the advantages and disadvantages of the various design choices, performance results, and the integration of the plugin systems from CMS and Gaudi, another open-source software framework. Recommendations about DD4hep based upon the CMS use cases will also be presented.

Issues and Aspects of Open Source Software Usage and Adoption in the Public Sector

2009 ◽  
pp. 1577-1591
Author(s):  
Gabor Laszlo
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Complex Model ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
To Come

This chapter introduces L-PEST model as the proposed tool for better understanding the fields are influenced by motivations and adaptation policy on FLOSS of public authorities and governments. Software usage in the public sector is a highly complex topic. In the confines of this chapter the selected case studies will show consideration to the vastly different needs and capacities and the different approaches and motivations towards the utilization of FLOSS by governments and/or local authorities. The primary objective of this chapter is to identify and describe the actors associated to the usage of FLOSS within and by the public sector. This chapter has made an attempt to fill this research gap and place the different actors into one complex model. It is hoped the proposed model assists better clarifying the intricate relationship between relevant factors. Nevertheless, much more research work is needed in the years to come. According to Michel Sapin, French Minister in charge of Public Administration and e-Government (2001), “The next generation e-government has two requirements: interoperability and transparency. These are the two strengths of open source software. Therefore, I am taking little risk when I predict that open source software will take a crucial part in the development of e- Government in the years to come.”

A Mediator for Biospatial Information Systems

2011 ◽  
pp. 2650-2664
Author(s):  
Renato Barrera ◽  
Abraham Alcántara ◽  
Carlos Alegría ◽  
Ana L. Ávila ◽  
David Esparza
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Geographic Information Systems ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Relational Databases ◽  
Geographic Information ◽  
International Standards ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Reliability And Robustness

This article presents a system to enable access to those Information Systems at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) that are related to Biodiversity and the Environment. The system in question associates existing Geographic Information Systems (GIS’s) as well as standard relational databases in a federation, allows the contents of the individual GIS (or relational databases) to be consulted in a manner transparent to the user, and permits the exports of the underlying systems’ data under the corresponding set of permissions. Our approach is based upon three principles: compliance with international standards, reliance upon Open Source Software in implementation, and usage of servers of proven reliability and robustness. [Article copies are available for purchase from InfoSci-on-Demand.com]

Techno-Feminist View on the Open Source Software Development

2008 ◽  
pp. 3365-3373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuwei Lin
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Gender Gap ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Gender Issue ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
To Come

Current debate on women in free/libre open source software (FLOSS) tends to fall into the gender stereotype of men and women when coming across to the gender issue. This article stays away from a reductionism that simplifies the gender issue in the FLOSS community to the level of a fight between men and women. Instead of splitting women from men in the FLOSS development, this analysis helps motivate both men and women to work together, reduce the gender gap and improve the disadvantaged statuses of women and a wider users’ community in the FLOSS development. More importantly, it addresses not only the inequality that women face in computing, but also other inequalities that other users face, mainly emerging from the power relationships between expert and lay person (namely, developer and user) in software design. In so doing, the issue at stake is not only to create a welcome environment for women to join the FLOSS development, but also to come up with a better way of encouraging both sexes to collaborate with each other. This article starts from how FLOSS can make a difference for today’s information society, and present some successful stories of implementing FLOSS in developing countries and rural areas to empower women and the minority. Consequently, it discusses the problem of including more women and the minority in the FLOSS development through deconstructing the myth of the programming skill.

Issues and Aspects of Open Source Software Usage and Adoption in the Public Sector

2011 ◽  
pp. 445-459
Author(s):  
Gabor Laszlo
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Complex Model ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
The Public ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
To Come

This chapter introduces L-PEST model as the proposed tool for better understanding the fi elds are influenced by motivations and adaptation policy on FLOSS of public authorities and governments. Software usage in the public sector is a highly complex topic. In the confines of this chapter the selected case studies will show consideration to the vastly different needs and capacities and the different approaches and motivations towards the utilization of FLOSS by governments and/or local authorities. The primary objective of this chapter is to identify and describe the actors associated to the usage of FLOSS within and by the public sector. This chapter has made an attempt to fill this research gap and place the different actors into one complex model. It is hoped the proposed model assists better clarifying the intricate relationship between relevant factors. Nevertheless, much more research work is needed in the years to come. According to Michel Sapin, French Minister in charge of Public Administration and e-Government (2001), “The next generation e-government has two requirements: interoperability and transparency. These are the two strengths of open source software. Therefore, I am taking little risk when I predict that open source software will take a crucial part in the development of e-Government in the years to come.”

scholarly journals New Developer Metrics for Open Source Software Development Challenges: An Empirical Study of Project Recommendation Systems

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 920
Author(s):  
Abdulkadir Şeker ◽  
Banu Diri ◽  
Halil Arslan
Keyword(s):  
Software Development ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Recommendation System ◽  
Similarity Score ◽  
Open Source Software Development ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Pull Request ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Collaboration Platforms

Software collaboration platforms where millions of developers from diverse locations can contribute to the common open source projects have recently become popular. On these platforms, various information is obtained from developer activities that can then be used as developer metrics to solve a variety of challenges. In this study, we proposed new developer metrics extracted from the issue, commit, and pull request activities of developers on GitHub. We created developer metrics from the individual activities and combined certain activities according to some common traits. To evaluate these metrics, we created an item-based project recommendation system. In order to validate this system, we calculated the similarity score using two methods and assessed top-n hit scores using two different approaches. The results for all scores with these methods indicated that the most successful metrics were binary_issue_related, issue_commented, binary_pr_related, and issue_opened. To verify our results, we compared our metrics with another metric generated from a very similar study and found that most of our metrics gave better scores that metric. In conclusion, the issue feature is more crucial for GitHub compared with other features. Moreover, commenting activity in projects can be equally as valuable as code contributions. The most of binary metrics that were generated, regardless of the number of activities, also showed remarkable results. In this context, we presented improvable and noteworthy developer metrics that can be used for a wide range of open-source software development challenges, such as user characterization, project recommendation, and code review assignment.

Techno-Femenist View on the Open Source Software Development

2011 ◽  
pp. 1148-1153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuwei Lin
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Gender Gap ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Gender Issue ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
To Come

Current debate on women in free/libre open source software (FLOSS) tends to fall into the gender stereotype of men and women when coming across to the gender issue. This article stays away from a reductionism that simplifies the gender issue in the FLOSS community to the level of a fight between men and women. Instead of splitting women from men in the FLOSS development, this analysis helps motivate both men and women to work together, reduce the gender gap and improve the disadvantaged statuses of women and a wider users’ community in the FLOSS development. More importantly, it addresses not only the inequality that women face in computing, but also other inequalities that other users face, mainly emerging from the power relationships between expert and lay person (namely, developer and user) in software design. In so doing, the issue at stake is not only to create a welcome environment for women to join the FLOSS development, but also to come up with a better way of encouraging both sexes to collaborate with each other. This article starts from how FLOSS can make a difference for today’s information society, and present some successful stories of implementing FLOSS in developing countries and rural areas to empower women and the minority. Consequently, it discusses the problem of including more women and the minority in the FLOSS development through deconstructing the myth of the programming skill.

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