Open-source developers have long done their work in the public eye. Now, they're doing it under an academic microscope.
Walt Scacchi, a senior research scientist at the University of California at Irvine's Institute for Software Research, has been looking at open-source projects from an analytical perspective, studying the open-source model in an ongoing, 10-year project that draws some comforting conclusions for open-source sponsors and developers.
Scacchi and fellow researchers have found a significant failure rate among open-source projects. But among those that get off the ground, research has shown not only that the open-source approach can yield better software more quickly and for less money than traditional methods but also that volunteering for an open-source project can be an effective way to get a job.
Scacchi's work is as much sociological as technical, as he and colleagues examine phenomena like "community building" and cultural institutions alongside drier subjects like code and project design.
And academia's work on open source is more than academic. Three projects by Scacchi and colleagues at UC, Santa Clara University and the University of Illinois will use the data to design new development tools for big, multi-organisation projects.
Scacchi and colleagues are at work on four different research projects. Their first National Science Foundation grants came through in the autumn of 2000, following a few years of unfunded research. Current funding will bring the project through 2006, and Scacchi estimates that it will be at least a 10-year research investment. He spoke to CNET News.com about his work from his office in Irvine, California.
What exactly is your research trying to determine?
In general, we're trying to understand how free and open-source software development works in practice. Are the processes the same that are taught in engineering classes, the guidelines that we teach in academia? Or are they doing something else? If so, is it a poor version of software engineering, bumbling along in such a way that they wouldn't do it if they knew better?
We've looked at free and open-source projects, multiple projects in multiple communities, not only the popular areas like Web or Web infrastructure software -- Mosaic and Apache are two examples -- but are also looking at open-source practices in the computer game community or in the world of astrophysics and deep-space imaging or academic-software design. By looking at multiple projects across these different arenas, what we see is something different than what's advocated in the principles of software engineering.
