A Multi-Step Process Towards Integrating Free and Open Source Software in Engineering Education

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is a phenomenon which has overgrown its software origins. From being viewed as a cheaper software alternative, it has become a fountain head of ideas which are adopted cheerfully by people across many domains. From a collaborative effort to build world's biggest encyclopaedia to artists sharing their works under liberal licences, FOSS has become a reference for global, peer-reviewed, volunteer based production model of creating knowledge commons. With everyone from governments to big corporates displaying keen interest in FOSS, it is high time educationalists too take FOSS into classrooms. The ecology of FOSS is filled with more than just a set of software from which a teacher can choose from. He can bring the rich set of coding practices, licensing options, production model and importantly a different world-view by adopting FOSS in teaching. The benefits for students too are many ranging from using modern tools to participating in real world software development. There are many scholarly papers reporting the innovative use of FOSS in teaching graduate courses. By combining these studies with our experience of delivering courses in FOSS, we present a three-stage process which can be adopted by teachers and institutes to utilise the benefits of FOSS to the fullest.

An Exploratory Analysis and Classification of Papers Presented in a Decade of OSS Conferences Using Revised Taxonomy

On the occasion of completion of ten years of Open Source Systems (OSS) conferences, this paper studies its contribution to the extension of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) research. An existing taxonomy was used to initially classify the 347 full and short papers presented in the conferences. Because there were many new categories, which did not fit, in existing system, the taxonomy was revised and the reclassified papers are presented in this paper. The analysis of locations, themes, participants and citations of successive conferences results in interesting observation. The major takeaway of this ongoing study is to demonstrate that the goal of OSS conferences, as mentioned in the first edition, “to promote the exchange of new ideas, research and applications in the emerging field of Open Source Software,” is more than successful.

Exploratory Analysis of Free and Open Source Software Ecology

Shared repositories provide a host of services to start and sustain a FOSS project. They also share the details of projects with researchers. Sourceforge.net is a popular and populous forge with total number of projects exceeding 400,000 and developers counting more than 3 million as of Jan 2015. The evolution of this forge is studied and it was found that there is a small slide in the number of developers since September 2011. The existence of power law in Sourceforge.net is confirmed. The visualisation of developer relations reveal that there is a separate core and periphery groups of developers in Sourceforge.net and this trend was found to repeat in other forges like Freecode and Rubyforge.

Micro Studies of FOSS Ecology

Sourceforge.net is the largest portal hosting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Among the projects available in sourceforge.net, six top ranked projects are selected for studying global volunteer collaboration patterns over a period of 6 years (2005-2011). It is found that a small set of volunteers do most of the work in these projects. The growth rate of volunteers, identification of core developers, join and drop rate of volunteers, task allocation and rate of task completion, movement of existing volunteers among different projects and the rate of new volunteer inclusion are also studied.

Graph Mining Approaches to Study Volunteer Relationships in Sourceforge.net

The contribution of volunteers in the development of Free and Open Source Software in Sourceforge.net is studied in this paper. Using Social Network analysis, the small set of developers who can maximize the information flow in the network are discovered. The propagation of top developers across past three years are also studied. The four algorithms used to find top influential developers gives almost similar results. The movement of top developers over past years was also consistent. Influential nodes in a network are very important to diffuse influence on the rest of the network. They are most often highly connected within the network. The existing algorithms are efficient to identify them. However, the challenge is in selecting a seed set that can spread the influence instantaneously with least effort. In this paper, a method is defined to spread influence on the entire network by selecting the least number of non-overlapping influential nodes faster than a well known existing algorithm. Further to this, the number of clusters in the network is also determined simultaneously from the seed set of the networks.

Finding Influential Nodes in Sourceforge.net Using Social Network Analysis

The contribution of volunteers in the development of Free and Open Source Software in Sourceforge.net is studied in this paper. Using Social Network analysis, the small set of developers who can maximize the information flow in the network are discovered. The propagation of top developers across past three years are also studied. The four algorithms used to find top influential developers gives almost similar results. The movement of top developers over past years years was also consistent.

Studies of Project Tasks

Among the projects available in sourceforge.net, the three top ranked projects are selected for studying the pattern of project tasks over a period of 6 years (2005-2011). It is found that the number of tasks in projects decrease with time in these projects. It is also observed that the amount of time taken to complete the task decrease with time. The developers alloted to tasks in a project, success rate the developers complete the tasks completely, and active contribution to the project by completing the alloted tasks of the volunteers are also studied.

Macro Studies of FOSS Ecology

The ecology of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is dotted by projects of every kind ranging from small desktop applications to large mission critical systems. To enable maximum visibility among the developer community, these projects are often hosted in community project management portals. The current work studies one such portal, sourceforge.net by analyzing the data of 200,000 projects and 2 million developers for the period Feb 2005 to Aug 2009. The scope of the present study includes the analysis of developer contribution. The slow growth rate of developer community and high number of single developer projects are the major findings of the present work.