One of the biggest strength of many modern programming languages is their rich open source package ecosystem. Indeed, modern language-specific package managers have made it much easier to share reusable code and depend on components written by someone else (often by total strangers). However, while they make programmers more productive, such practices create new health risks at the level of the ecosystem: when a heavily-used package stops being maintained, all the projects that depend on it are threatened. In this paper, I ask three questions. RQ1: How prevalent is this threat? In particular, how many depended-upon packages are maintained by a single person (who can drop out at any time)? I show that this is the case for a significant proportion of such packages. RQ2: How can project authors that depend on a package react to its maintainer becoming unavailable? I list a few options, and I focus in particular on the notion of fork. RQ3: How can the programmers of an ecosystem react collectively to such events, or prepare for them? I give a first look at an emerging model of community organizations for the long-term maintenance of packages, that appeared in several ecosystems.
We advocate for a paradigm shift in supporting free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) ecosystem maintenance, from focusing on individual projects to monitoring a whole organic system of the entire FLOSS ecosystem, which we call software meta-maintenance. We discuss challenges of building a global source code management system, a global issue management system, and FLOSS human capital index, based on the blockchain technologies.
a) Context: In many programming language ecosystems, developers rely more and more on external open source dependencies, made available through package managers. Key ecosystem packages that go unmaintained create a health risk for the projects that depend on them and for the ecosystem as a whole. Therefore, community initiatives can emerge to alleviate the problem by adopting packages in need of maintenance. b) Objective: The goal of our study is to explore such community initiatives, that we will designate from now on as Community Package Maintenance Organizations (CPMOs) and to build a theor…
Motivation. Digital commons is an emerging phenomenon and of increasing importance, as we enter a digital society. Open data is one example that makes up a pivotal input and foundation for many of today's digital services and applications. Ensuring sustainable provisioning and maintenance of the data, therefore, becomes even more important. Aim. We aim to investigate how such provisioning and maintenance can be collaboratively performed in the community surrounding a common. Specifically, we look at Open Data Ecosystems (ODEs), a type of community of actors, openly sharing and evolving data on…
Software systems are increasingly depending on data, particularly with the rising use of machine learning, and developers are looking for new sources of data. Open Data Ecosystems (ODE) is an emerging concept for data sharing under public licenses in software ecosystems, similar to Open Source Software (OSS). It has certain similarities to Open Government Data (OGD), where public agencies share data for innovation and transparency. We aimed to explore open data ecosystems involving commercial actors. Thus, we organized five focus groups with 27 practitioners from 22 companies, public organizat…
The information systems landscape is at first sight very different from how it was 20 years ago. On the other hand, it seems that we are still struggling with many of the same problems, including late or abandoned projects and unfilled customer demands. In this article we present selected data from survey investigations from 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008 and 2013 among Norwegian organizations on how they conduct information systems development and maintenance. In particular we compare data from 2008 and 2013 in more detail. A major finding is that whereas main work distribution numbers was very stabl…
Many software projects are no longer done in-house by a single organization. Instead, we are in a new age where software is developed by a networked community of individuals and organizations, which base their relations to each other on mutual interest. Paradoxically, recent research suggests that software development can actually be jointly-developed by rival firms. For instance, it is known that the mobile-device makers Apple and Samsung kept collaborating in open source projects while running expensive patent wars in the court. Taking a case study approach, we explore how rival firms collab…
The software ecosystem is a trust-rich part of the world. Collaboratively, software engineers trust major hubs in the ecosystem, such as package managers, repository services, and programming language ecosystems. This trust, however, is often broken by vulnerabilities, ransomware, and abuse from malignant actors. But what is trust? In this paper we explore, through twelve in-depth interviews with software engineers, how they perceive trust in their daily work. From the interviews we conclude three things. First, software engineers make a distinction between an adoption factor and a trust facto…
Mainframe systems are facing a critical shortage of developer workforce as the current generation of COBOL developers retires. Furthermore, due to the limited availability of public COBOL resources, entry-level developers, who assume the mantle of legacy COBOL systems maintainers, face significant difficulties during routine maintenance tasks, such as code comprehension and defect location. While we made substantial advances in the field of software maintenance for modern programming languages yearly, mainframe maintenance has received limited attention. With this study, we aim to direct the a…
Digitalization and servitization are impacting many domains, including the mining industry. As the equipment becomes connected and technical infrastructure evolves, business models and risk management need to adapt. In this paper, we present a study on how changes in asset and risk distribution are evolving for the actors in a software ecosystem (SECO) and system-of-systems (SoS) around a mining operation. We have performed a survey to understand how Service Level Agreements (SLAs) -- a common mechanism for managing risk -- are used in other domains. Furthermore, we have performed a focus grou…
Large software organizations handle many customer support issues every day in the form of bug reports, feature requests, and general misunderstandings as submitted by customers. Strategies to gather, analyze, and negotiate requirements are complemented by efforts to manage customer input after products have been deployed. For the latter, support tickets are key in allowing customers to submit their issues, bug reports, and feature requests. Whenever insufficient attention is given to support issues, there is a chance customers will escalate their issues, and escalation to management is time-co…
Leveraging Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) has been widely acknowledged as a valuable approach to software and system design that have promoted the acceleration of products and services development by allowing the decoupling of interface design from service implementation details. Many organizations in the news and journalism industry have adopted and promoted this API oriented approach. In the first part of this paper, we provide a survey of the most significant recent work around traditional news and journalistic open APIs and how these have been influenced by and impacted the news…
