| 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 different
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 conferences
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. |
