Free/Open Sourse Software Development

326 Pages·2004·5.035 MB·English

by  Stefan Koch

Free/Open Source
Software Development
Stefan Koch
IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING
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Free/Open Source
Software Development
Stefan Koch
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria
IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING
Hershey • London • Melbourne • Singapore
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Free/open source software development / Stefan Koch, Editor.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-59140-369-3 -- ISBN 1-59140-370-7 (pbk.) -- ISBN 1-59140-371-5 (ebook)
1. Computer software--Development. 2. Open source software. I. Koch, Stefan.
QA76.76.S46F74 2004
005.1--dc22
2004003748
British Cataloguing in Publication Data
A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.
All work contributed to this book is new, previously-unpublished material. The views
expressed in this book are those of the authors, but not necessarily of the publisher.
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Free/Open Source
Software Development
Table of Contents
Preface .............................................................................................................vii
Section I: F/OSS Development - “Intensive Analysis”
Chapter I
Do Not Check in on Red: Control Meets Anarchy in Two Open Source
Projects ..............................................................................................................1
Jesper Holck, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Niels Jørgensen, Roskilde University, Denmark
Chapter II
Analyzing the Anatomy of GNU/Linux Distributions: Methodology and
Case Studies (Red Hat and Debian) .............................................................27
Jesús M. González-Barahona, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Gregorio Robles, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Miguel Ortuño-Pérez, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Luis Rodero-Merino, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
José Centeno-González, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Vicente Matellán-Olivera, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Eva Castro-Barbero, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Pedro de-las-Heras-Quirós, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
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Chapter III
The Co-Evolution of Systems and Communities in Free and Open
Source Software Development ......................................................................59
Yuwen Ye, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA and
SRA Key Technology Lab, Japan
Kumiyo Nakakoji, University of Tokyo, Japan
Yasuhiro Yamamoto, University of Tokyo, Japan
Kouichi Kishida, SRA Key Technology Lab, Japan
Section II: F/OSS Development and Software
Engineering Practices - “Extensive Analysis”
Chapter IV
The Role of Modularity in Free/Open Source Software Development .....84
Alessandro Narduzzo, Universitá di Bologna, Italy
Alessandro Rossi, Universitá di Trento, Italy
Chapter V
A Quantitative Study of the Adoption of Design Patterns by Open
Source Software Developers ........................................................................103
Michael Hahsler, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Administration, Austria
Section III: F/OSS Projects as Social Constructs
Chapter VI
Coordination and Social Structures in an Open Source Project:
VideoLAN .....................................................................................................125
Thomas Basset, Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, France and
Ecole Normale Superieure de Chachan, France
Chapter VII
Free Software Development: Cooperation and Conflict in a Virtual
Organizational Culture ...............................................................................152
Margaret S. Elliott, University of California, Irvine, USA
Walt Scacchi, University of California, Irvine, USA
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Section IV: Simulating F/OSS Development - “Dynamic Swarms”
Chapter VIII
Dynamical Simulation Models of the Open Source Development
Process ...........................................................................................................174
I.P. Antoniades, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
I. Samoladas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
I. Stamelos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
L. Angelis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
G.L. Bleris, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Chapter IX
Modeling the Free/Open Source Software Community: A Quantitative
Investigation .................................................................................................203
Gregory Madey, University of Notre Dame, USA
Vincent Freeh, North Carolina University, USA
Renee Tynan, University of Notre Dame, USA
Section V: F/OSS Development Interacting
with Commercial and Public Organizations
Chapter X
Benefits and Pitfalls of Open Source in Commercial Contexts ................222
Jiayin Hang, Siemens Business Services GmbH & Co. OHG, Germany
Heidi Hohensohn, Siemens Business Services GmbH & Co. OHG,
Germany
Klaus Mayr, IFS IT GmbH, Germany
Thomas Wieland, University of Applied Sciences Coburg, Germany
Chapter XI
Experiences Enhancing Open Source Security in the POSSE
Project ...........................................................................................................242
Jonathan M. Smith, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Michael B. Greenwald, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Sotiris Ioannidis, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Angelos D. Keromytis, Columbia University, USA
Ben Laurie, AL Digital, Ltd., USA
Douglas Maughan, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, USA
Dale Rahn, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Jason Wright, University of Pennsylvania, USA
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Section VI: Implications of the F/OSS
Development Model - “The Broad Picture”
Chapter XII
The Impact of Open Source Development on the Social Construction
of Intellectual Property ................................................................................259
Bernd Carsten Stahl, De Montfort University, UK
Chapter XIII
The Social Production of Ethics in Debian and Free Software
Communities: Anthropological Lessons for Vocational Ethics ................273
E. Gabriella Coleman, University of Chicago, USA
Benjamin Hill, Debian Project, USA
About the Editor ..........................................................................................296
About the Authors ........................................................................................297
Index ..............................................................................................................306

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vii
Preface
In the last few years, free and open source software has gathered increasing
interest, both from the business and the academic worlds. As some projects in dif-
ferent application domains, like Linux together with the suite of GNU utilities,
GNOME, KDE, Apache, sendmail, bind, and several programming languages, have
achieved huge success in their respective markets, they have demonstrated that this
new development paradigm can produce output of considerable quality. This has
led to massive business interest, has given rise to new corporations like RedHat or
VA Software (formerly having achieved a record-breaking IPO 1999 with a 700
percent gain on its first day of trading under the name of VA Linux), and has spurred
organizations both small and large (like IBM, Sun Microsystems or Netscape) to
invest in one way or the other into this new field.
Academic interest in this new form of collaborative software development has
also grown, arising from very different backgrounds including software engineering,
sociology, management, and psychology, and has gained increasing prominence, as
can be deduced from the number of international journals like Management Science,
Information Systems Journal, Electronic Markets or Research Policy, and confer-
ences like ICSE dedicating special issues, workshops, and tracks to this new field of
research. As diverse as the background of researchers are their approaches and the
issues tackled. The current research that can be attributed to this field ranges from
quantitative analysis of source code or other artifacts of the software development
to uncover programming practices and the efficiency of this development model, to
sociological field work soliciting information in interviews about the ways in which
coordination and communication in these virtual teams are accomplished. This book
will try to give an overview of current research. It aims to be an up-to-date inventory
of research approaches and outlooks. As yet, an edited volume of academic papers
dealing with free and open source software development has not been available,
and it is hoped that this book will provide a first step towards attributing this line of
research the prominence and credibility it so richly deserves, given the high-quality
output produced, as can now be witnessed by any interested reader.
A note is in order about the title of this book. In a first version, the proposed
title was Open Source Software Development, the announcement of which led to an
e-mail response from Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, in which he
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argued that by using this title all relevant and important work of the Free Software
community would be subsumed by the Open Source movement (which of course
was never intended), and its very existence denied. Following his reasoning, the title
was changed, not going further into ideological differences in the outlook of both
communities, but explicitly acknowledging the inspiring work done by both. An
additional term often used in this context, especially in Europe, libre software was
not included to maintain readability and because it constitutes more of an artificial
term with which no larger group of developers identifies.
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
The organization of this book is intended to reflect the very different research
approaches taken in the field of free and open source software development. There-
fore, the chapters have been grouped into no less than six parts, each one dealing
with a slightly different focus or outlook. With this, the book provides an overview
of this very active field of research, and an interested reader or researcher might be
able to identify the approach or focus he or she would like to take in future reading
or work. Although there are many different possibilities for classifying the chapters
presented here, and even more for all the research currently done, the organization
presented here tries to constitute a starting point for discussing and developing a
coherent framework for the diverse activities in the field of free and open source
software development.
Section I: F/OSS Development - “Intensive Analysis”
Section I contains three chapters that provide what seems to constitute the
heart and most important first step of current research. They all deal with a small
number of projects and detail several facets of these. Therefore, the term intensive
analysis is used here, to be distinguished from the extensive analyses performed in
the chapters forming Section II. The first chapter, “Do Not Check in on Red: Control
Meets Anarchy in Two Open Source Projects” by Jesper Holck and Niels Jørgensen,
is a prototypical example in which the authors describe the most important elements
of the software development process in the Mozilla and FreeBSD projects. For each
of these elements, the struggle for optimal balance between control—supposedly
necessary for producing high-quality software—and anarchy—supposedly neces-
sary for attracting and keeping voluntary developers—is discussed. The authors
give a superb picture of the free and open source software development process,
documenting and analyzing similarities between free and open source projects and
commercial software development.
The second chapter, “Analyzing the Anatomy of GNU/Linux Distributions:
Methodology and Case Studies (Red Hat and Debian)” by Jesús M. González-Bara-
hona, Gregorio Robles, and colleagues, presents a quantitative and longitudinal study
of one of the most important and visible aspects of free and open source software:
GNU/Linux distributions. Using a total of nine different versions of the Red Hat
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and Debian distributions, the authors base their analysis on the source code itself,
and also include a detailed description of the methodology applied. This approach
allows the study of the evolution of parameters like total distribution size, size and
version of different packages, or usage of different programming languages, thus
offering insights into the free and open source projects providing the foundation for
these distributions, as well as the process of producing a distribution, which poses
an enormous integration task and therefore a large project in itself.
Chapter III is titled “The Co-Evolution of Systems and Communities in Free
and Open Source Software Development” and is written by Yunwen Ye, Kumiyo
Nakakoji, Yasuhiro Yamamoto, and Kouichi Kishida. In this chapter, the authors
see beyond the software product and document its relationship to the development
community, analyzing the co-evolution that results. Using four projects in which
the authors are involved as case studies, they find that projects co-evolve differently
depending on the goal of the system and the structure of the community. This leads
to a proposed classification scheme for free and open source projects and practical
implications of recognizing the co-evolution and the type of project.
Section II: F/OSS Development and Software Engineering
Practices - “Extensive Analysis”
The two chapters forming Section II have both their focus on the role of a
single concept from “traditional” software engineering literature in free and open
source software development and their analysis of several projects in common,
therefore providing an example of extensive research. The first chapter in this
part is by Alessandro Narduzzo and Alessandro Rossi and is titled “The Role of
Modularity in Free/Open Source Software Development,” which very adequately
describes its theme. The authors discuss especially the development of different free
and open Unix-systems using the theory of modularity applied to both the software
architecture and the organization of the projects.
Chapter V, “A Quantitative Study of the Adoption of Design Patterns by Open
Source Software Developers” by Michael Hahsler, describes a large-scale quantita-
tive analysis of the usage of design patterns. The analysis is based on data extracted
from the version-control system of the SourceForge hosting site and encompasses
almost 1,000 projects. Results indicate that design patterns, as proposed by software
engineering literature, are indeed used as a practice to improve communication, as
larger projects tend towards increased adoption rates and more productive com-
munity members. In addition to these results, this chapter serves as an excellent
example of the “testbed” function that free and open source software projects might
provide for software engineering researchers because their publicly available data
allows for large-scale studies.
Section III: F/OSS Projects as Social Constructs
Section III of this book, “F/OSS Projects as Social Constructs,” contains two
chapters that take a distinctly sociological position and foremost view free and open
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