Related papers: The New Dynamics of Open Source: Relicensing, Fork…
Open-source software (OSS) is widely spread in industry, research, and government. OSS represents an effective development model because it harnesses the decentralized efforts of many developers in a way that scales. As OSS developers work…
Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While several studies propose refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns and removing design defects, little is known about how…
Background: Open Source Software (OSS) is often seen as an option to mitigate risks of lock-ins. Yet, single-vendor OSS can still result in soft lock-ins due to knowledge asymmetries and technical barriers. Aim: This study explores actors…
Documenting frameworks provides its users and maintainers useful information on that software's architecture, design, and customization. Despite documentation's importance, the process of creating and maintaining it is considered to imply…
Open-source large language models have made platforms such as Hugging Face central hubs for decentralized AI innovation. Yet these ecosystems are shaped not only by collaboration, but also by competition for priority and community…
Many open source software (OSS) projects need more human resources for maintenance, improvements, and sometimes even their survival. These needs allegedly apply even to vital OSS projects that can be seen as being a part of the world's…
Software bots have been facilitating several development activities in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However, these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently occurs with new technology…
The fact that the number of users of open source software (OSS) is practically un-limited and that ultimately the software quality is determined by end users experience, makes the usability an even more critical quality attribute than it is…
We introduce a large-scale dataset of the complete texts of free/open source software (FOSS) license variants. To assemble it we have collected from the Software Heritage archive-the largest publicly available archive of FOSS source code…
The race to train language models on vast, diverse, and inconsistently documented datasets has raised pressing concerns about the legal and ethical risks for practitioners. To remedy these practices threatening data transparency and…
Background: Contemporary software development organizations lack diversity and the ratios of women in Free and open-source software (FOSS) communities are even lower than the industry average. Although the results of recent studies hint the…
Existing innovation metrics inadequately capture software innovation, creating blind spots for researchers and policymakers seeking to understand and foster technological innovation in an increasingly software-defined economy. This paper…
Open Source Software for Social Good (OSS4SG) projects aim to address critical societal challenges, such as healthcare access and community safety. Understanding the community dynamics and contributor patterns in these projects is essential…
The pull-based development model facilitates global collaboration within open-source software projects. However, whereas it is increasingly common for software to depend on other projects in their ecosystem, most research on the pull…
Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the use of open source projects by common novice users; Open Source Software (OSS) is thus no longer a reserved arena for software developers and computer gurus. Although user-centered designs are…
Companies claim to "democratise" artificial intelligence (AI) when they donate AI open source software (OSS) to non-profit foundations or release AI models, among others, but what does this term mean and why do they do it? As the impact of…
Reliance on third-party libraries is now commonplace in contemporary software engineering. Being open source in nature, these libraries should advocate for a world where the freedoms and opportunities of open source software can be enjoyed…
Contemporary development projects benefit from code review as it improves the quality of a project. Large ecosystems of inter-dependent projects like OpenStack generate a large number of reviews, which poses new challenges for collaboration…
Open-source licenses establish the legal foundation for software reuse, yet license variants, including both modified standard licenses and custom-created alternatives, introduce significant compliance complexities. Despite their prevalence…
The widespread adoption of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) means that the ongoing maintenance of many widely used software components relies on the collaborative effort of volunteers who set their own priorities and choose their…