We are very pleased to introduce Open Source Development, Communities and Quality. The International Conference on Open Source Systems has come to its fourth edition – OSS 2008. Now, Free, Libre, and Open Source software is by all means now one of the most relevant subjects of study in several disciplines, ranging from information technology to social sciences and including also law, business, and political sciences. There are several conference tracks devoted to open source software with several publications appearing in high quality journals and magazines. OSS 2008 has been organized with the purpose of being the reference venue for those working in this area, being the most prominent conference in this area. For this th reason OSS 2008 has been located within the frameworks of the 20 World Computer Congress, WCC 2008, in Milan, the largest event of IFIP in 2008. We believe that this conference series, and the IFIP working group it represents, can play an important role in meeting these challenges, and hope that this book will become a valuable contribution to the open source body of research.

We are very pleased to introduce Open Source Development, Communities and Quality. The International Conference on Open Source Systems has come to its fourth edition – OSS 2008. Now, Free, Libre, and Open Source software is by all means now one of the most relevant subjects of study in several disciplines, ranging from information technology to social sciences and including also law, business, and political sciences. There are several conference tracks devoted to open source software with several publications appearing in high quality journals and magazines. OSS 2008 has been organized with the purpose of being the reference venue for those working in this area, being the most prominent conference in this area. For this th reason OSS 2008 has been located within the frameworks of the 20 World Computer Congress, WCC 2008, in Milan, the largest event of IFIP in 2008. We believe that this conference series, and the IFIP working group it represents, can play an important role in meeting these challenges, and hope that this book will become a valuable contribution to the open source body of research.

Any B. Sc. or M. Sc. study programme in the computing discipline typically ends with a capstone project. A capstone project builds and tests the skills and the knowledge acquired during the education and is an essential part of the training towards becoming a professional. There is a large number of different terms for these types of projects: capstone project, senior project, final year project, B. Sc. / M. Sc. thesis project, etc. In this book we will use the term ‘thesis project’, and in some cases, for the sake of simplicity, just ‘project’. This book focuses on thesis projects within the computing discipline. Thus, the type of project discussed in this book is in line with the capstone format described in the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2001 Computer Science (p. 53): … an alternative capstone format is a research experience that includes some original work, a review of the scientific literature, and an investigation of a proposed solution, f- lowed by a scientific paper and/or an oral presentation of the results. It is important to remember that these are undergraduates and be realistic about the amount and quality of research expected. Even so, it may be more worthwhile to expose outstanding students to the challenges of research than to have them design and build yet another program In this book, we present a process for conducting thesis projects with the resear- orientation described in the quote above.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2016, held in Gothenburg, Sweden, in May/June 2016. The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to free, libre, and open source software, including: organizational aspects of communities; organizational adoption; participation of women; software maintenance and evolution; open standards and open data; collaboration; hybrid communities; code reviews; and certification.

Welcome to the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems! It is quite an achievement to reach the five-year mark – that’s the sign of a successful enterprise. This annual conference is now being recognized as the primary event for the open source research community, attracting not only high-quality papers, but also building a community around a technical program, a collection of workshops, and (starting this year) a Doctoral Consortium. Reaching this milestone reflects the efforts of many people, including the conference founders, as well as the organizers and participants in the previous conferences. My task has been easy, and has been greatly aided by the hard work of Kevin Crowston and Cornelia Boldyreff, the Program Committee, as well as the Organizing Team led by Björn Lundell. All of us are also grateful to our attendees, especially in the difficult economic climate of 2009. We hope the participants found the conference valuable both for its technical content and for its personal networking opportunities. To me, it is interesting to look back over the past five years, not just at this conference, but at the development and acceptance of open source software. Since 2004, the business and commercial side of open source has grown enormously. At that time, there were only a handful of open source businesses, led by RedHat and its Linux distribution. Companies such as MySQL and JBoss were still quite small.

Welcome to the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems! It is quite an achievement to reach the five-year mark – that’s the sign of a successful enterprise. This annual conference is now being recognized as the primary event for the open source research community, attracting not only high-quality papers, but also building a community around a technical program, a collection of workshops, and (starting this year) a Doctoral Consortium. Reaching this milestone reflects the efforts of many people, including the conference founders, as well as the organizers and participants in the previous conferences. My task has been easy, and has been greatly aided by the hard work of Kevin Crowston and Cornelia Boldyreff, the Program Committee, as well as the Organizing Team led by Björn Lundell. All of us are also grateful to our attendees, especially in the difficult economic climate of 2009. We hope the participants found the conference valuable both for its technical content and for its personal networking opportunities. To me, it is interesting to look back over the past five years, not just at this conference, but at the development and acceptance of open source software. Since 2004, the business and commercial side of open source has grown enormously. At that time, there were only a handful of open source businesses, led by RedHat and its Linux distribution. Companies such as MySQL and JBoss were still quite small.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International IFIP WG 2.13 Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2012, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in September 2012. The 15 revised full papers presented together with 17 lightning talks, 2 tool demonstration papers, 6 short industry papers, 5 posters and 2 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on collaboration and forks in OSS projects, community issues, open education and peer-production models, integration and architecture, business ecosystems, adoption and evolution of OSS, OSS quality, OSS in different domains, product development, and industrial experiences.

We are very pleased to introduce Open Source Development, Communities and Quality. The International Conference on Open Source Systems has come to its fourth edition – OSS 2008. Now, Free, Libre, and Open Source software is by all means now one of the most relevant subjects of study in several disciplines, ranging from information technology to social sciences and including also law, business, and political sciences. There are several conference tracks devoted to open source software with several publications appearing in high quality journals and magazines. OSS 2008 has been organized with the purpose of being the reference venue for those working in this area, being the most prominent conference in this area. For this th reason OSS 2008 has been located within the frameworks of the 20 World Computer Congress, WCC 2008, in Milan, the largest event of IFIP in 2008. We believe that this conference series, and the IFIP working group it represents, can play an important role in meeting these challenges, and hope that this book will become a valuable contribution to the open source body of research.

We are very pleased to introduce Open Source Development, Communities and Quality. The International Conference on Open Source Systems has come to its fourth edition – OSS 2008. Now, Free, Libre, and Open Source software is by all means now one of the most relevant subjects of study in several disciplines, ranging from information technology to social sciences and including also law, business, and political sciences. There are several conference tracks devoted to open source software with several publications appearing in high quality journals and magazines. OSS 2008 has been organized with the purpose of being the reference venue for those working in this area, being the most prominent conference in this area. For this th reason OSS 2008 has been located within the frameworks of the 20 World Computer Congress, WCC 2008, in Milan, the largest event of IFIP in 2008. We believe that this conference series, and the IFIP working group it represents, can play an important role in meeting these challenges, and hope that this book will become a valuable contribution to the open source body of research.

Any B. Sc. or M. Sc. study programme in the computing discipline typically ends with a capstone project. A capstone project builds and tests the skills and the knowledge acquired during the education and is an essential part of the training towards becoming a professional. There is a large number of different terms for these types of projects: capstone project, senior project, final year project, B. Sc. / M. Sc. thesis project, etc. In this book we will use the term ‘thesis project’, and in some cases, for the sake of simplicity, just ‘project’. This book focuses on thesis projects within the computing discipline. Thus, the type of project discussed in this book is in line with the capstone format described in the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2001 Computer Science (p. 53): … an alternative capstone format is a research experience that includes some original work, a review of the scientific literature, and an investigation of a proposed solution, f- lowed by a scientific paper and/or an oral presentation of the results. It is important to remember that these are undergraduates and be realistic about the amount and quality of research expected. Even so, it may be more worthwhile to expose outstanding students to the challenges of research than to have them design and build yet another program In this book, we present a process for conducting thesis projects with the resear- orientation described in the quote above.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International IFIP WG 2.13 International Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2016, held in Gothenburg, Sweden, in May/June 2016. The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to free, libre, and open source software, including: organizational aspects of communities; organizational adoption; participation of women; software maintenance and evolution; open standards and open data; collaboration; hybrid communities; code reviews; and certification.

Welcome to the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems! It is quite an achievement to reach the five-year mark – that’s the sign of a successful enterprise. This annual conference is now being recognized as the primary event for the open source research community, attracting not only high-quality papers, but also building a community around a technical program, a collection of workshops, and (starting this year) a Doctoral Consortium. Reaching this milestone reflects the efforts of many people, including the conference founders, as well as the organizers and participants in the previous conferences. My task has been easy, and has been greatly aided by the hard work of Kevin Crowston and Cornelia Boldyreff, the Program Committee, as well as the Organizing Team led by Björn Lundell. All of us are also grateful to our attendees, especially in the difficult economic climate of 2009. We hope the participants found the conference valuable both for its technical content and for its personal networking opportunities. To me, it is interesting to look back over the past five years, not just at this conference, but at the development and acceptance of open source software. Since 2004, the business and commercial side of open source has grown enormously. At that time, there were only a handful of open source businesses, led by RedHat and its Linux distribution. Companies such as MySQL and JBoss were still quite small.

Welcome to the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems! It is quite an achievement to reach the five-year mark – that’s the sign of a successful enterprise. This annual conference is now being recognized as the primary event for the open source research community, attracting not only high-quality papers, but also building a community around a technical program, a collection of workshops, and (starting this year) a Doctoral Consortium. Reaching this milestone reflects the efforts of many people, including the conference founders, as well as the organizers and participants in the previous conferences. My task has been easy, and has been greatly aided by the hard work of Kevin Crowston and Cornelia Boldyreff, the Program Committee, as well as the Organizing Team led by Björn Lundell. All of us are also grateful to our attendees, especially in the difficult economic climate of 2009. We hope the participants found the conference valuable both for its technical content and for its personal networking opportunities. To me, it is interesting to look back over the past five years, not just at this conference, but at the development and acceptance of open source software. Since 2004, the business and commercial side of open source has grown enormously. At that time, there were only a handful of open source businesses, led by RedHat and its Linux distribution. Companies such as MySQL and JBoss were still quite small.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International IFIP WG 2.13 Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2012, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in September 2012. The 15 revised full papers presented together with 17 lightning talks, 2 tool demonstration papers, 6 short industry papers, 5 posters and 2 workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on collaboration and forks in OSS projects, community issues, open education and peer-production models, integration and architecture, business ecosystems, adoption and evolution of OSS, OSS quality, OSS in different domains, product development, and industrial experiences.