Section 11.8. Research on Libre Software

11.8. Research on Libre Software

An 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):

• The FLOSS group at MERIT, University of Maastrich (http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS; the Netherlands; focus on the economics of libre software and the motivations of developers)

• The Software Engineering Group at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki ( http://sweng.csd.auth.gr; Greece; strong emphasis on studying the development processes)

• The Open Source group at University College Cork (http://opensource.ucc.ie; Ireland, research on libre software processes)

• The Software Engineering team at the Department of CSIS, University of Limerick (http://www.csis.ul.ie; Ireland; focus on processes, organization, and coordination)

• The Libre Software Engineering group at the University Rey Juan Carlos (http://libresoft.dat.escet.urjc.es; Spain; focused on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of projects)

• The Distributed Software Engineering Group at University of Lincoln ( http://facs.lincoln.ac.uk/Research/Distributed; the UK; focused on the relationship of libre software development and agile methods, and on its distributed component)

• The Software Engineering Group at Politecnico di Torino (Italy; focus on evolution and maintenance)

• The Center for Applied Software Engineering at Free University of Bolzano-Bozen (Italy; research on metrics applied to libre software and its relationship to agile methods)

• The team at the Institute of Computing Science at Poznan University of Technology (http://www.cs.put.poznan.pl; Poland; focus on data mining of publicly available information)

• The Open Source Group at the University of Szeged (http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/opensource; Hungary; publishing on quality and complexity metrics)

• The Science and Technology Policy Research team at SPRU, University of Sussex (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/1-4-9.html; the UK; focus on the economics of libre software development)

• The Open Source research team at Technical University of Berlin ( http://ig.cs.tu-berlin.de/forschung/OpenSource; Germany; research on economics and politics of libre software)

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).