[Discussioni] C4P: Evolution of Open-Source Code Bases (EVOSC05)

[Andrea Trentini]

http://www.sl-lab.it/~evosc05/

Theme and goals

Releasing software with an open-source license is basically an economical or social issue. Any individual, group of developers, or firm may decide they could benefit from giving their users the right to copy, modify, and distribute their software under the terms of a liberal licence. In most cases, this ``gift'' gives life to a community that is in charge of further developing the software product. These communities are usually regulated by some sort of loose organization. It is often possible for anyone to join these organizations in order to influence the evolution of the product by actively participating in the design and coding process. Nevertheless, several users of open-source products decide not to be involved in their reference community for various reasons: it might appear too costly, it might not be appealing from a strategic perspective, or it could be denied by the community itself. Sometimes these users are just free riders: they decide to enjoy a piece of softwa

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because they can use it for free, and they depend on the developing community to keep the product useful for them. However, the very essence of open-source software is that it enables custom evolutions. Custom evolutions can be peripheral, when they affect marginal details of a product, or even revolutionary when they dramatically change design assumptions underlying the software. If these evolutions are carried on outside the community who drives the development, they produce branches that can be hard to merge back into the main code base. Nevertheless, merging the main trunk with custom branches is often critical for inheriting evolutions that are not at the core interest of the independent developer (typically security fixes, for example).

Topics

This workshop aims at sharing ideas about evolving open-source code bases, without losing the benefit of a community working on the same software. We are looking for papers that describe new approaches for dealing with custom evolutions. We are especially interested in techniques aimed at:

     * merging custom evolutions in a disciplined way;
     * assessing if a specific evolution is likely to be problematic;
     * deploying custom evolutions together with the standard code base;
     * managing families of custom evolutions at design, implementation, and deployment time

Workshop papers must be limited to 8 pages in the ACM two columns format.

Important dates

     * Abstracts submission: 20 April 2005
     * Full paper submission: 27 April 2005
     * Acceptance notification: 13 May 2005
     * Camera-ready version: 25 May 2005
     * Workshop date: 11 July 2005

Program Committee

     * Antonio Carzaniga, University of Lugano, Switzerland
     * Renzo Davoli, Università degli Studi di Bologna, Italy
     * Elisabetta Di Nitto, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
     * Kazuhiro Fujieda, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
     * Harald Gall,  University of Zurich, Switzerland
     * Martin Michlmayr, University of Cambridge, UK
     * Mattia Monga, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
     * Andrea Trentini, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy


Full PDF call for papers:
http://www.sl-lab.it/~evosc05/evosc05-cfp.pdf

Please, feel free to forward this call

Thank you

-- 
Il grado di civilizzazione di una societa' puo' essere giudicato
entrando nelle sue prigioni.
		-- F. Dostoyevski
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Andrea Trentini - D.I.Co - Universita' di Milano - http://www.sl-lab.it - http://www.atrent.it
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*Evolution of Open-Source Code Bases (EVOSC05), 11-July-2005 @ http://www.sl-lab.it/~evosc05 *
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