Hello Friends, <sorry for any x-postings> I have updated our community website to reflect new paper submissions. Many thanks to all the authors for their contributions. Please provide direct feedback to the authors! See you soon, Karim ========================================================== Paper 1 Authors: Nadine Kalwey, Stefan Kooths, Markus Langenfurth Title: Open Source Software - An Economic Assessment http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/kalweykoothslangenfurth.pdf Abstract: This study examines whether or not Open Source Software represents an economically suitable alternative to the proprietary commercial software market in terms of creating value-added and economic efficiency. Whereas no significant differences between both production processes are seen for customized software, the study comes to the conclusion that serious economic problems can occur in the field of packaged software. Starting from a discussion on how licenses like the GPL affect the ability to price software (which is usually below economic production costs), the impact of below cost pricing on the coordination capacity of software markets (customer sovereignty, resource allocation, income distribution, adaptability and innovation) and the sustainability of complementary strategies of Open Source business models (with and without cross subsidization of the non-market OSS-core) are described. Throughout the study, the role of the pricing system within a market economy is stressed considering the specific characteristics of software as an economic good. Aspects other than economic are not taken into account. Paper 2 Authors Kevin Crowston, Hala Annabi, James Howison and Chengetai Masango Title: Towards a Portfolio of FLOSS project Success Measures. http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/crowston04towards.pdf Abstract: Project success is one of the most widely used dependent variables in information systems research. However, conventional measures of project success are difficult to apply to Free/Libre Open Source Software projects. In this paper, we present an analysis of four measures of success applied to SourceForge projects: number of members of the extended development community, project activity, bug fixing time and number of downloads. We argue that these four measures provide different insights into the collaboration and control mechanisms of the projects. Paper 3 Authors: James Howison and Kevin Crowston Title: The perils and pitfalls of mining SourceForge. http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/howison04msr.pdf Abstract: SourceForge provides abundant accessible data from Open Source Software development projects, making it an attractive data source for software engineering research. However it is not without theoretical peril and practical pitfalls. In this paper, we outline practical lessons gained from our spidering, parsing and analysis of SourceForge data. SourceForge can be practically difficult: projects are defunct, data from earlier systems has been dumped in and crucial data is hosted outside SourceForge, dirtying the retrieved data. These practical issues play directly into analysis: decisions made in screening projects can reduce the range of variables, skewing data and biasing correlations. SourceForge is theoretically perilous: because it provides easily accessible data items for each project, tempting researchers to fit their theories to these limited data. Worse, few are plausible dependent variables. Studies are thus likely to test the same hypotheses even if they start from different theoretical bases. To avoid these problems, analyses of SourceForge projects should go beyond project level variables and carefully consider which variables are used for screening projects and which for testing hypotheses. ====================================== Updated Paper Authors: West, Joel & Siobhán O’Mahony Title: Contrasting Community Building in Sponsored and Community Founded Open Source Projects http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/westomahony.pdf Abstract: Prior characterizations of open source projects have been based on the model of a community-founded project. More recently, a second model has emerged, where organizations spinout internally developed code to a public forum. Based on field work on open source projects, we compare the lifecycle differences between these two models. We identify problems unique to spinout projects, particularly in attracting and building an external community. We illustrate these issues with a feasibility analysis of a proposed open source project based on VistA, the primary healthcare information system of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. This example illuminates the complexities of building a community after a code base has been developed and suggests that open source software can be used to transfer technology to the private sector. ======================================== Call for Papers & Book Chapters CFP1 Journal:Knowledge, Technology & Policy, Second Special Issue on Open Source Editors:Ruben van Wendel de Joode, Delft University of Technology, Yuwei Lin, University of York & Shay David, Cornell University Deadline:December 1, 2005 See Call for Papers:http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/ktpcallforpapers.pdf CFP2 Book: The Economics of Open Source Software Development: Analyzing Motivation, Organization, Innovation and Competition in the Open Source Software Revolution Editors: Dr. Jürgen Bitzer, Free University Berlin & Philipp J.H. Schröder, Ph.D., Aarhus School of Business Deadline: February 1, 2005 See Call for Book Chapters: http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/bookcallforchapters.pdf -- Karim R. Lakhani MIT Sloan | The Boston Consulting Group Mobile: +1 (617) 851-1224 http://spoudaiospaizen.net http://web.mit.edu/lakhani/www | http://opensource.mit.edu