Title: The impact of project licence and operating system on the effectiveness of the defect-fixing process in open source software projects

Authors: Amir Hossein Ghapanchi; Aybuke Aurum

Addresses: Room #2102, West Wing, Quadrangle Building, School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, The University of New South Wales, NSW 2052, Australia. ' Room #2102, West Wing, Quadrangle Building, School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, The University of New South Wales, NSW 2052, Australia

Abstract: Open source software (OSS) products have been widely adopted by commercial as well as government organisations. However, despite their increased adoption, many OSS projects still fail in responding to users| quality needs such as resolving software defects. Hence, this paper investigates the responsiveness of OSS projects to users| needs in terms of resolving software defects. To do so, we develop and test a model of antecedents to the effectiveness of the defect-fixing process for OSS projects. Data gathered for this study from 1481 OSS projects confirms that OSS projects that apply a less restrictive licence are less dependent on their team to operate their defect-fixing process. It is also demonstrated that OSS projects developed to run on a broader range of operating systems are more likely to have an effective defect-fixing. The study provides practitioners with insightful recommendations on project characteristics and defect-fixing effectiveness.

Keywords: open source software; OSS projects; defect fixing effectiveness; operating systems; OSS licence; software defects; error correction.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2011.042398

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2011 Vol.8 No.4, pp.413 - 424

Published online: 30 Sep 2014 *

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