Background: Open Source Software (OSS) started as an effort of communities of volunteers, but its practices have been adopted far beyond these initial scenarios. For instance, the strategic use of OSS in industry is constantly growing nowadays in different verticals, including energy, automotive, and health. For the public sector, however, the adoption has lagged behind even if benefits particularly salient in the public sector context such as improved interoperability, transparency, and digital sovereignty have been pointed out. When Public Sector Organisations (PSOs) seek to engage with OSS, this introduces challenges as they often lack the necessary technical capabilities, while also being bound and influenced by regulations and practices for public procurement. Aim: We aim to shed light on how public sector OSS projects, i.e., projects initiated, developed and governed by public sector organizations, are developed and structured. We conjecture, based on the challenges of PSOs, that the way development is organized in these type of projects to a large extent disalign with the commonly adopted bazaar model (popularized by Eric Raymond), which implies that development is carried out collaboratively in a larger community. Method: We plan to contrast public sector OSS projects with a set of earlier reported case studies of bazaar OSS projects, including Mockus et al.'s reporting of the Apache web server and Mozilla browser OSS projects, along with the replications performed on the FreeBSD, JBossAS, JOnAS, and Apache Geronimo OSS projects. To enable comparable results, we will replicate the methodology used by Mockus et al. on a purposefully sampled subset of public sector OSS projects. The subset will be identified and characterized quantitatively by mining relevant software repositories, and qualitatively investigated through interviews with individuals from involved organizations.
翻译:背景:开源软件(OSS)最初是由志愿者社区努力发起的,但其实践已远远超出了这些初始情景。例如,现如今在不同垂直领域,包括能源、汽车和卫生等方面,战略使用OSS的情况不断增长。然而,公共部门的采用滞后了,即使指出了在公共部门背景下特别明显的好处,例如改进互操作性、透明度和数字主权。当公共部门组织(PSOs)寻求参与OSS时,这带来了挑战,因为他们通常缺乏必要的技术能力,而且受公共采购的法规和惯例的约束和影响。目的:我们旨在揭示公共部门OSS项目,即由公共部门组织发起、开发和治理的项目,是如何开发和结构化的。我们猜测,基于PSOs的挑战,这类项目的开发组织在很大程度上与通常采用的集市模型不一致(由Eric Raymond流行),这意味着开发是在一个更大的社区中协作进行的。方法:我们计划将公共部门OSS项目与一组早期报告的开放式集市OSS项目进行对比,其中包括由Mockus等人报告的Apache Web Server和Mozilla浏览器OSS项目,以及在FreeBSD、JBossAS、JOnAS和Apache Geronimo OSS项目上执行的复制品。为了获得可比较的结果,我们将在有目的地选择的一组公共部门开源软件项目中复制Mockus等人使用的方法。这个子集将通过挖掘相关的软件仓库进行数量上的识别和表征,并通过与涉及组织的个人进行质性调查来进行质性研究。