Background: Open Source Software (OSS) started as an effort of communities of
volunteers, but its practices have been adopted far beyond these initial
scenarios. For instance, the strategic use of OSS in industry is constantly
growing nowadays in different verticals, including energy, automotive, and
health. For the public sector, however, the adoption has lagged behind even if
benefits particularly salient in the public sector context such as improved
interoperability, transparency, and digital sovereignty have been pointed out.
When Public Sector Organisations (PSOs) seek to engage with OSS, this
introduces challenges as they often lack the necessary technical capabilities,
while also being bound and influenced by regulations and practices for public
procurement. Aim: We aim to shed light on how public sector OSS projects, i.e.,
projects initiated, developed and governed by public sector organizations, are
developed and structured. We conjecture, based on the challenges of PSOs, that
the way development is organized in these type of projects to a large extent
disalign with the commonly adopted bazaar model (popularized by Eric Raymond),
which implies that development is carried out collaboratively in a larger
community. Method: We plan to contrast public sector OSS projects with a set of
earlier reported case studies of bazaar OSS projects, including Mockus et al.'s
reporting of the Apache web server and Mozilla browser OSS projects, along with
the replications performed on the FreeBSD, JBossAS, JOnAS, and Apache Geronimo
OSS projects. To enable comparable results, we will replicate the methodology
used by Mockus et al. on a purposefully sampled subset of public sector OSS
projects. The subset will be identified and characterized quantitatively by
mining relevant software repositories, and qualitatively investigated through
interviews with individuals from involved organizations.Comment: Registered Report accepted at MSR'2