[p2p-research] ames Herbsleb on Open Source Ecologies

[Paul B. Hartzog]

perhaps an interesting scholar/work
-p



James D. Herbsleb

Associate Professor, Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon

Open Source Ecologies





Abstract --



Open source software communities, once primarily the realm of volunteer

"hobbyists," have become a powerful mechanism enabling cooperative

construction of public goods.  Firms, volunteers, foundations,

consultants and others participate in a wide variety of ways, forming a

complex network of relationships -- an ecology.  In this talk I will

describe preliminary results from two studies that seek to shed light on

how these ecologies function.  First is a qualitative study of how the

Eclipse ecology solves the problem of allowing competitors to

collaborate over distance in the creation of a common platform, while

simultaneously building competing products on top of the platform.

Second is a study of the how the ongoing influx of commercial developers

affects volunteer participation in the Gnome community.  Our results

show that the influx tends to drive volunteers away from the particular

modules the commercial developers work on, but "well-behaved" commercial

developers actually attract new volunteers to the project.  I will

conclude with a few conjectures and open problems.





Bio --



James D. Herbsleb is Associate Professor of Computer Science and

Director of the Software Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon

University. His research interests lie primarily in the intersection of

software engineering and computer-supported cooperative work, focusing

on such areas as geographically-distributed development teams, open

source software development, and more generally on coordination in

software engineering. He holds a JD (1980) and a PhD in psychology

(1984) from the University of Nebraska, and an MS in computer science

(1991) from the University of Michigan.



After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of

Michigan, he moved to Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute,

where he led an effort to empirically validate the CMM for Software. He

then joined the Software Production Research Department at Lucent

Technologies, where he initiated and led the Bell Labs Collaboratory

Project, which conducted empirical studies and designed collaborative

technologies and practices for global software development. He is

currently PI on two NSF-funded projects investigating various aspects of

collaborative software engineering. His research interests are in

geographically-distributed software engineering, open source software

development, collaboration over distance, and tools and technologies

that support coordination.



The Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work (CREW) is composed
of students and faculty who are interested in the novel ways of
working made possible by new information technologies.  Once a month,
CREW hosts a public seminar. All are welcome.  For more information
about CREW and its seminar series, please visit our web page at
http://www.crew.umich.edu.





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