The social structure of free
software communities
Course: Dynamics of libre software communities
Israel Herraiz
<herraiz@gsyc.es>
st
A Coruña, December 1 2007
Master on Free Software

Summary
Do you want to become a free software
●
developer?
How would you start?
●
How would you approach an existing
●
project?
Is there any typical social structure in free
●
software projects?
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FLOSS projects
Projects are like any other human
●
organization
People assume different roles
●
If you want to migrate from a role to
●
another, what do you have to do?
Do all the projects present a typical
●
structure?
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Roles in FLOSS projects
Users
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Occasional users
–
Power users
–
Bug reporters
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Bug fixers
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Developers
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Core developers
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Onion model
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Onion model migration
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Sequence
User
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Start to participate in the community
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Report bugs
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Fix bugs
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Get a SCM account
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Challenge
Find one of the main contributors in your
●
project
Find that developer in the mailing list
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Track her participation in the mailing lists
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Track her participation in the SCM
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Track her relative importance and
●
absolute total contributions
Who is your developer?
●
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Challenge
Track the number of people participating
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in the user lists
Track the number of people participating
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in the developer lists
Track the number of people commiting
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changes
All of these over time
●
What is the ration among these
●
parameters over time?
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Challenge
Track the total amount of messages in the
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user and developers lists
Track the total amount of changes
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All of these over time
●
What are the ratios among these
●
parameters?
What about messages per person and
●
commits per person? How do they
evolve?
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References
The social structure of Free and Open
●
source software development
The processes of joining in global
●
distributed software projects
Both papers included in the Moodle
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