FLOSS communities: Analyzing evolvability and robustness from an industrial perspective

Abstract

Plenty of companies try to access Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) products, but they find a lack of documentation and responsiveness from the libre software community. But not all of the communities have the same capacity to answer questions. Even more, most of these communities are driven by volunteers which in most of the cases work on their spare time. Thus, how active and reliable is a community and how can we measure their risks in terms of quality of the community is a main issue to be resolved. Trying to determine how a community runs and look for their weaknesses is a way to improve themselves and, also, a way to obtain trustworthiness from an enterprise point of view. In order to have a statistical basement, around 1400 FLOSS projects have been studied to create thresholds which will help to determine a project's current status compared with this initial set of FLOSS communities. © 2010 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.