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The Lives and Deaths of Open Source Code Forges

Published: 23 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Code forges are third party software repositories that also provide various tools and facilities for distributed software development teams to use, including source code control systems, mailing lists and communication forums, bug tracking systems, web hosting space, and so on. The main contributions of this paper are to present some new data sets relating to the technology adoption lifecycles of a group of six free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS) code forges, and to compare the lifecycles of the forges to each other and to the model presented by classical Diffusion of Innovation (DoI) theory. We find that the observed adoption patterns of code forges rarely follow the DoI model, especially as larger code forges are beset by spam and abuse. The only forge exhibiting a DoI-like lifecycle was a smaller, community-managed, special-purpose forge whose demise was planned in advance. The results of this study will be useful in explaining adoption trajectories, both to practitioners building collaborative FLOSS ecosystems and to researchers who study the evolution and adoption of socio-technical systems.

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Open Source License Inconsistencies on GitHubACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/357185232:5(1-23)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2022
  • (2020)A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE USE OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTSProblems of Education in the 21st Century10.33225/pec/20.78.11478:1(114-128)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2020
  • (2020)The Software Heritage Graph DatasetProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3379597.3387510(1-5)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2020
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
OpenSym '17: Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration
August 2017
218 pages
ISBN:9781450351874
DOI:10.1145/3125433
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 23 August 2017

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Author Tags

  1. CodePlex
  2. FLOSS
  3. GitHub
  4. Google Code
  5. ObjectWeb
  6. Open source
  7. RubyForge
  8. SourceForge
  9. code forge
  10. diffusion of innovations
  11. free software
  12. software evolution
  13. technology adoption

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OpenSym '17

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Overall Acceptance Rate 108 of 195 submissions, 55%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Open Source License Inconsistencies on GitHubACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/357185232:5(1-23)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2022
  • (2020)A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE USE OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IN EDUCATIONAL CONTEXTSProblems of Education in the 21st Century10.33225/pec/20.78.11478:1(114-128)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2020
  • (2020)The Software Heritage Graph DatasetProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3379597.3387510(1-5)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2020
  • (2020)Software provenance tracking at the scale of public source codeEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-020-09828-5Online publication date: 29-May-2020
  • (2019)The software heritage graph datasetProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1109/MSR.2019.00030(138-142)Online publication date: 26-May-2019
  • (2018)Building the universal archive of source codeCommunications of the ACM10.1145/318355861:10(29-31)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2018

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