Sustainability of open source projects is one of my major concerns. Similar to any other shared-resource system, participation inequality is a major challenge in open source. This is known as the “volunteer’s dilemma”: everybody wants to benefit from...
In the last years, a number of Open-Source Systems (OSS) have created parallel foundations, as legal instruments to better articulate the structure, collaboration, and financial model for the project. Some examples are Apache, Linux, Mozilla, Eclipse or Django...
A long time ago, Greg Wilson recommended reading The Discussion book: 50 great ways to get people talking. In fact, he went even further and proposed a research challenge to the Sofware Engineering / Computer Support Cooperative Work communities: score existing...
The network of collaborations in an open source project can reveal relevant emergent properties that influence its prospects of success. In this work, we analyze open source projects to determine whether they exhibit a rich-club behavior, i.e., a phenomenon where...
Software is the infrastructure that powers our digital society. And most of this software is either Open Source Software (OSS) or heavily relies on it. And while this is great news in many ways, it’s also a huge problem, given that most open source projects face...
