The Right to a Contribution: An Exploratory Survey on How Organizations Address It

Part 5: Intellectual Property and Legal IssuesInternational audienceFree and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects are characterized by the opportunity to attract external contributors, where contributions can be in any form of copyrightable material, such as code or documentation. In most of them it is understood that contributions would be licensed in similar or compatible terms than the project’s license. Some projects require a copyright transfer from the contributor to an organization for the work contributed to a project, such documents are known as copyright assignment agreements. In a way, it is similar to the copyright transfer than some researchers grant to a publisher. In this work we present an exploratory survey of the multiple visions of copyright assignments, and aggregate them in a work that researchers and practitioners could use to get informed of the alternatives available in the literature. We expect that our findings help inform practitioners on legal concerns when receiving external contributions

On the Variability of the BSD and MIT Licenses

Part 5: Intellectual Property and Legal IssuesInternational audienceThe MIT/X11 and the BSD are two of the most important family of Free and Open Source (FOSS) licenses. Because these licenses are to be inserted into the files that use it, and because they are expected to be changed by those who use them, their text has suffered alterations over time. Some of this variability is the result of licenses containing template fields which allow the license to be customized to include information such as the copyright holder name. Other variability can be attributed to changes in spelling, punctuation, and adding or removing conditions. This study empirically evaluated the extent that the BSD and MIT/X11 family of licenses are varied, and the manner and frequency in which license texts vary from the original definition. The study found that the BSD family has little variability, with a significant proportion fitting the common standard. The MIT/X11 family of licenses exhibited significantly more variation, with a higher propensity to customize the license text. In addition, the MIT/X11 license has spawned several specialized variants which likely constitute different legal meanings. Based on these findings, recommendations are proposed on what variability needs to be accommodated by the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) which is in the process of standardizing the allowed variability of both licenses

Herding cats: A case study of release management in an open collaboration ecosystem

Release management in large-scale software development projects requires significant communication and coordination. It is particularly challenging in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystems, in which hundreds of loosely connected developers and their projects need to be coordinated to release software to a schedule. To better understand this process and its challenges, we analyzed over two and half years of communication in the GNOME ecosystem and studied developers’ interactions. We cataloged communication channels, categorized high level communication and coordination activities in one of them, and triangulated our results by interviewing developers. We found that a release schedule, influence instead of direct control, and diversity are factors that impact positively the release process in the GNOME ecosystem. Our results can help organizations build better large-scale teams and show that research focused on individual projects might miss important parts of the picture

Replication package for How the R Community Creates and Curates Knowledge: An Extended Study of Stack Overflow and Mailing Lists

This dataset was used in the paper: "How the R Community Creates and Curates Knowledge: An Extended Study of Stack Overflow and Mailing Lists", Journal of Empirical Software Engineering, to appear

The structure at 2 A resolution of Phycocyanin from Gracilaria chilensis and the energy transfer network in a PC-PC complex.

Phycocyanin is a phycobiliprotein involved in light harvesting and conduction of light to the reaction centers in cyanobacteria and red algae. The structure of C-phycocyanin from Gracilaria chilensis was solved by X-ray crystallography at 2.0 A resolution in space group P2(1). An interaction model between two PC heterohexamers was built, followed by molecular dynamic refinement. The best model showed an inter-hexamer rotation of 23 degrees . The coordinates of a PC heterohexamer (alphabeta)(6) and of the PC-PC complex were used to perform energy transfer calculations between chromophores pairs using the fluorescence resonance energy transfer approach (FRET). Two main intra PC ((I)beta(3)(82)-->(I)alpha(1)(84)-->(I)alpha(5)(84)-->(I)beta(6)(82) and (I)beta(3)(153)-->(I)beta(5)(153)) and two main inter PC ((I)beta(6)(82)-->(II)beta(3)(82) and (I)beta(5)(153)-->(II)beta(3)(153)) pathways were proposed based on the values of the energy transfer constants calculated for all the chromophore pairs in the hexamer and in the complex