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The Business Retention and Expansion Program (BREP) in New Jersey is a com munity-based program, sponsored jointly by the New Jersey Department of Com merce and Economic Development and the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, that seeks to forge volunteer public/private partnerships in pursuit of local eco nomic stability and development. The purpose of this paper is to test hypotheses de rived from the literature on the well-springs of public sector action, using volun tary participation in BREP as the research context. After a brief description of the program, the paper extracts its guiding hypotheses from the discussion of "city limits" offered by Peterson (1981). Using correlation and multiple regression analyses, it discovers-as anticipated from the general theory-(1) that need is the strongest predictor of community participation in BREP and (2) that, after con trolling for need, neither community economic capacity nor the weight of local business interests plays any significant role in explaining participation. The impli cations of these empirical findings are then discussed in a brief concluding note.

Similar to software systems, programming languages evolve substantially over time. Indeed, the community has more recently seen the release of new versions of mainstream languages in shorter and shorter time frames. For instance, the C++ working group has begun to release a new version of the language every 3 years, which now has a greater number of modern C++ features and improvements in modern standards (C++11, C++14, C++17, and C++ 20). Nonetheless, there is little empirical evidence on how developers are transitioning to use modern C++ constructs in legacy systems, and not understanding the trends and reasons for adopting these new modern C++ features might hinder software developers in conducting rejuvenation efforts. In this paper, we conduct an in‐depth study to understand the development practices of KDE contributors to evolve their projects toward the use of modern C++ features. Our results show a trend in the widespread adoption of some modern C++ features (lambda expressions, auto‐typed variables, and range‐based for) in KDE community projects. We also found that developers in the KDE community are making large efforts to modernize their programs using automated tools, and we present some modernization scenarios and the benefits of adopting modern C++ features of the C++ programming language. Our results might help C++ software developers, in general, to evolve C++ legacy systems and tools builders to implement more effective tools that could help in rejuvenation efforts.