Category: Research

Planet FLOSS Rides Again

I have maintained a blog about my work in FLOSS (and other avenues I’ve explored more recently) for several years now, in two or three different incarnations. For much of that time, I was one of many bloggers syndicated on Planet FLOSS Research, a website that brought together a number of blogs all on the… read more

Saros @ ICSE (Again!)

Saros and the Freie Universität Berlin will once again be at the premier venue for software engineering research this year. ICSE 2011 takes place in Hawaii. The organisers are now recognising plug-in development as a legitimate and distinct area of concern in software engineering. If you’re lucky enough to be there yourself, go along to… read more

Doing the Rounds

(This is an old draft article that I rediscovered.) A while ago, while obtaining my regular fix of Ben Goldacre’s pronouncements over at the Bad Science blog, something Ben had had cause briefly to explain lodged into my mind. In a mere couple of sentences, Ben explained what a “grand round” is in the world… read more

Poll results: Most used version control systems in Eclipse

The poll has been closed. After over 100 votes, Git has emerged as the winner, although not resoundingly so. The only notable “other” was ClearCase with about 6% of the vote. The final results table is below. Git 35% CVS 24% Mercurial 22% Other 12% Perforce 5% Bazaar 2% Thanks to all those who took… read more

Poll: What version control system do you use with Eclipse?

It was so much fun using the poll technology last time, I thought I would try again. You may be familiar with Saros — our plug-in which provides distributed collaborative editing in Eclipse — and you may even know that Saros now features version control system (VCS) integration, so that all participants can work directly… read more

An Open Source Eco-System?

To summarise the prior writings from my doctoral thesis: I’ve shown how there are both notable differences and similarities between certain measures of FLOSS repositories (such as number of contributors attracted, rate of contributions, complexity control work, etc.) The pattern of similarities and differences that emerged clearly differentiated one group (containing Debian, GNOME, and KDE)… read more

Saros @ ICSE

ICSE 2010 is over. Those lucky enough to have gone have had their reward of first dibs on the material presented, so now I can present a brief summary of the paper that we in the Software Engineering group at Freie Universität produced for that conference. The paper is both a way of announcing Saros… read more

The Catalyst Effect in FLOSS Repositories

In the course of my PhD studies, I proposed that when a project makes a transition from one repository to another, you could expect to see significant changes to a project’s evolutionary characteristics. Indeed, I covered this in earlier posts, discussing the transition from SourceForge to Debian. Here, we saw that the number of developers… read more

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