Forging a community - Not: Experiences on establishing an open source project

Abstract

Open source has recently become a practical and advocated fashion to develop, integrate, and license software. As a consequence, open source communities that commonly perform the development work are becoming important in the practice of software engineering. A community that is lively can often produce high-quality systems that continuously grow in terms of features, whereas communities that do not gain interest will inevitably perish. Despite their newly established central role, creation, organization, and management of such communities have not yet been widely studied from the viewpoint of software engineering practices. In this paper, we discuss experiences gained in the scope of Laika, an open source project established to develop an integrated software development environment for developing applications that run in Linux based mobile devices. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.