| 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. |