IRMA-International.org: Creator of Knowledge
Information Resources Management Association
Advancing the Concepts & Practices of Information Resources Management in Modern Organizations

Modeling the Free/Open Source Software Community: A Quantitative Investigation

Modeling the Free/Open Source Software Community: A Quantitative Investigation
View Sample PDF
Author(s): Gregory Madey (University of Notre Dame, USA), Vincent Freeh (North Carolina University, USA)and Renee Tynan (University of Notre Dame, USA)
Copyright: 2008
Pages: 3
Source title: Global Information Technologies: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Felix B. Tan (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-939-7.ch234

Purchase

View Modeling the Free/Open Source Software Community: A Quantitative Investigation on the publisher's website for pricing and purchasing information.

Abstract

In this chapter we summarize the latest results from an ongoing study examining Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) Development communities as self-organizing systems. Using publicly available data about projects, developers, and their relationships at F/OSS hosting sites such as SourceForge, we have found the existence of several power-law relationships, which is consistent with the contention that F/OSS communities are self-organizing systems. The F/OSS community is modeled as a collection of ad hoc, social networks consisting of heterogeneous agents, self-organizing into projects and clusters of projects. A computer simulation of the F/OSS community model is developed using SWARM, an agent-based simulation toolkit. Empirical data is used to parameterize the simulation, which in turn is used to investigate a social psychological model of communication and team effectiveness in F/OSS projects.

Related Content

Christian Rainero, Giuseppe Modarelli. © 2025. 26 pages.
Beatriz Maria Simões Ramos da Silva, Vicente Aguilar Nepomuceno de Oliveira, Jorge Magalhães. © 2025. 21 pages.
Ann Armstrong, Albert J. Gale. © 2025. 19 pages.
Zhi Quan, Yueyi Zhang. © 2025. 21 pages.
Sanaz Adibian. © 2025. 19 pages.
Le Ngoc Quang, Kulthida Tuamsuk. © 2025. 21 pages.
Jorge Lima de Magalhães, Carla Cristina de Freitas da Silveira, Tatiana Aragão Figueiredo, Felipe Gilio Guzzo. © 2025. 17 pages.
Body Bottom