11.8. Research on Libre SoftwareAn active research community is concerned with libre software in Europe. From sociologists and economists to software engineers, the interest in studying and understanding this phenomenon is on the increase. One of the first projects specifically devoted to analyzing the libre software world was the aforementioned FLOSS Survey and Study (led by Rishab Ghosh, University of Maastrich, Netherlands, and finished in 2002). It opened several lines of research, from authorship of libre software code to motivations of libre software developers. Some other pioneering works were performed by Stefan Koch ( http://wwwai.wu-wien.ac.at/~koch/uni.html) in Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (Austria), who in 2000 was already studying the GNOME project from a quantitative point of view, and by the group to which the authors of this chapter belong, at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain), who were studying Debian at the same time. Also in 2001, one of the first research workshops on libre software engineering took place, the Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering (http://opensource.ucc.ie/icse2001), organized by Joseph Feller and Brian Fitzgerald (both then at University College Cork, which hosts an active group on libre software engineering ( http://opensource.ucc.ie); Brian is now at the University of Limerick, also in Ireland) and Andre van der Hoek, and continued every year since. It is interesting to note that in that many of the papers presented at the workshop were by European groups, even though it was held in Toronto. Since those early day's many research groups have joined this field in Europe. Just to name a few of those researching libre software as a matter of study, we can mention (in no particular order):
There are, of course, many more research groups, and not finding one here implies nothing but my poor knowledge (please, forgive me if you are one of those not named). In particular, note that only groups, and not individuals, have been mentioned. Some of these groups are partners in the CALIBRE ( http://calibre.ie) coordinated action (already mentioned in the section about public administrations), funded by the European Commission and aimed at coordinating some of the research on libre software being performed in Europe and transmitting its results to industry. Although it is difficult to tell, we think that European research on the libre software phenomenon is at a very high level, and when compared to similar efforts in other parts of the world (mainly in the United States), it may be more focused on understanding how libre software projects work (whereas in other cases, the understanding is more a side effect of analyzing software development in general). |