Overview on Trust in Large FLOSS Communities

Abstract. The paper presents a survey of mature Free/Libre Open Source Software communities. The main focus of the survey is the collection of data related to the practices of these communities related to trust elements in their products. The survey is carried out using a structured questionnaire about thoughts and practices followed by Free/Libre Open Source Software communities. The survey focuses on the analysis of the development processes adopted by such communities. The results of the survey confirms basic ideas related to Free/Libre Open Source Software and explains in more detail specific issues related to trust and trustworthiness of the Free/Libre Open Source Software development process

Assessing the Open Source Development Processes Using OMM

The assessment of development practices in Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects can contribute to the improvement of the development process by identifying poor practices and providing a list of necessary practices. Available assessment methods (e.g., Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)) do not address sufficiently FLOSS-specific aspects (e.g., geographically distributed development, importance of the contributions, reputation of the project, etc.). We present a FLOSS-focused, CMMI-like assessment/improvement model: the QualiPSo Open Source Maturity Model (OMM). OMM focuses on the development process. This makes it different from existing assessment models that are focused on the assessment of the product. We have assessed six FLOSS projects using OMM. Three projects were started and led by a software company, and three are developed by three different FLOSS communities. We identified poorly addressed development activities as the number of commit/bug reports, the external contributions, and the risk management. The results showed that FLOSS projects led by companies adopt standard project management approaches as product planning, design definition, and testing, that are less often addressed by community led FLOSS projects. The OMM is valuable for both the FLOSS community, by identifying critical development activities necessary to be improved, and for potential users that can better decide which product to adopt

Decoding the "Free/Open Source(F/OSS) Software Puzzle" a survey of theoretical and empirical contributions

F/OSS software has been described by many as a puzzle. In the past five years, it has stimulated the curiosity of scholars in a variety of fields, including economics, law, psychology, anthropology and computer science, so that the number of contributions on the subject has increased exponentially. The purpose of this paper is to provide a sufficiently comprehensive account of these contributions in order to draw some general conclusions on the state of our understanding of the phenomenon and identify directions for future research. The exercise suggests that what is puzzling about F/OSS is not so much the fact that people freely contribute to a good they make available to all, but rather the complexity of its institutional structure and its ability to organizationally evolve over time.F/OSS software, Innovation, Incentives, Governance, Intellectual Property Rights

Loosen Control Without Losing Control. Formalisation and Decentralisation within Commons-Based Peer Production

This study considers commons-based peer production (CBPP) by examining the organizational processes of the free/libre open-source software community, Drupal. It does so by exploring the sociotechnical systems that have emerged around both Drupal's development and its face-to-face communitarian events. There has been criticism of the simplistic nature of previous research into free software; this study addresses this by linking studies of CBPP with a qualitative study of Drupal's organizational processes. It focuses on the evolution of organizational structures, identifying the intertwined dynamics of formalization and decentralization, resulting in coexisting sociotechnical systems that vary in their degrees of organicity

Open Source Software in Complex Domains: Current Perceptions in the Embedded Systems Area

With Nokia’s 770 and N800 Internet Tablets heavily utilising Open Source software, it is timely to ask whether – and if so to what extent – Open Source has made ingress into complex application domains such as embedded systems. In this paper we report on a qualitative study of perceptions of Open Source software in the secondary software sector, and in particular companies deploying embedded software. Although the sector is historically associated in Open Source software studies with uptake of embedded Linux, we find broader acceptance. The level of reasoning about Open Source quality and trust issues found was commensurate with that expressed in the literature. The classical strengths of Open Source, namely mass inspection, ease of conducting trials, longevity and source code access for debugging, were at the forefront of thinking. However, there was an acknowledgement that more guidelines were needed for assessing and incorporating Open Source software in products

SimCode: Agent-based Simulation Modelling of Open-Source Software Development

We present an original modeling tool, which can be used to study the mechanisms by which free/libre and open source software developers’ code-writing efforts are allocated within open source projects. It is first described analytically in a discrete choice framework, and then simulated using agent-based experiments. Contributions are added sequentially to either existing modules, or to create new modules out of existing ones: as a consequence, the global emerging architecture forms a hierarchical tree. Choices among modules reflect expectations of peer- regard, i.e. developers are more attracted a) to generic modules, b) to launching new ones, and c) to contributing their work to currently active development sites in the project. In this context, we are able – particularly by allowing for the attractiveness of “hot spots”-- to replicate the high degree of concentration (measured by Gini coefficients) in the distributions of modules sizes. The latter have been found by empirical studies to be a characteristic typical of the code of large projects, such as the Linux kernel. Introducing further a simple social utility function for evaluating the mophology of “software trees,” it turns out that the hypothesized developers’ incentive structure that generates high Gini coefficients is not particularly conducive to producing self-organized software code that yields high utility to end-users who want a large and diverse range of applications. Allowing for a simple governance mechanism by the introduction of maintenance rules reveals that “early release” rules can have a positive effect on the social utility rating of the resulting software trees.

When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance

Blockchain technologies have generated enthusiasm, yet their potential to enable new forms of governance remains largely unexplored. Two confronting standpoints dominate the emergent debate around blockchain-based governance: discourses characterized by the presence of techno-determinist and market-driven values, which tend to ignore the complexity of social organization; and critical accounts of such discourses which, while contributing to identifying limitations, consider the role of traditional centralized institutions as inherently necessary to enable democratic forms of governance. In this article, we draw on Ostrom’s principles for self-governance of communities to explore the transformative potential of blockchain beyond such standpoints. We approach blockchain through the identification and conceptualization of six affordances that this technology may provide to communities: tokenization, self-enforcement and formalization of rules, autonomous automatization, decentralization of power over the infrastructure, increasing transparency, and codification of trust. For each affordance, we carry out a detailed analysis situating each in the context of Ostrom’s principles, considering both the potentials of algorithmic governance and the importance of incorporating communities’ social practices into blockchain-based tools to foster forms of self-governance. The relationships found between these affordances and Ostrom’s principles allow us to provide a perspective focused on blockchain-based commons governance