Forge++: The Changing Landscape of FLOSS Development

In recent years, GITHUB has become the largest code host in the world, with more than 5M developers collaborating across 10M repositories. Numerous popular open source projects (such as Ruby on Rails, Homebrew, Bootstrap, Django or jQuery) have chosen GITHUB as their host and have migrated their code base to it. GITHUB offers a tremendous research potential. For instance, it is a flagship for current open source development, a place for developers to showcase their expertise to peers or potential recruiters, and the platform where social coding features or pull requests emerged. However, GITHUB data is, to date, largely underexplored. To facilitate studies of GITHUB, we have created GHTorrent, a scalable, queriable, offline mirror of the data offered through the GITHUB REST API. In this paper we present a novel feature of GHTorrent designed to offer customisable data dumps on demand. The new GHTorrent data-on-demand service offers users the possibility to request via a web form up-to-date GHTorrent data dumps for any collection of GITHUB repositories. We hope that by offering customisable GHTorrent data dumps we will not only lower the "barrier for entry" even further for researchers interested in mining GITHUB data (thus encourage researchers to intensify their mining efforts), but also enhance the replicability of GITHUB studies (since a snapshot of the data on which the results were obtained can now easily accompany each study).

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“…The GITHUB mirror and the predecessor of the current work [10], has also been used in empirical studies [21,24].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…GHTorrent data has already been used in empirical studies (e.g., [9,21,24]). In this paper we present a novel feature designed to offer customisable data dumps on demand.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lean GHTorrent: GitHub data on demand

Gousios

Vasilescu

Serebrenik

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

122

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“…Software forges are especially useful for large OSS projects and OSS ecosystems (Cosentino et al, 2017). The platform GitHub represents the newest generation of software forges, combining traditional capabilities (e.g., free hosting and a version control system) with several social features (Guendouz et al, 2015;Squire, 2014). It also supports the Git version-control system, with its features, social interactions (e.g., bug-tracking, issue-tracking, pull requests support, and profiles), and a powerful GitHub API to provide access to metadata around its hosted software projects (Rashid & Prakash, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizational Influencers in Open-Source Software Projects

Schreiber

2023

International Journal of Open Source Software and Processes

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Traditional software development is shifting toward the open-source development model, particularly in the current environment of competitive challenges to develop software openly. The author employs a case study approach to investigate how organizations and their affiliated developers collaborate in the open-source software (OSS) ecosystem TensorFlow (TF). The analysis of the artificial intelligence OSS library TF combines social network analysis (SNA) and an examination of archival data by mining software repositories. The study looks at the structure and evolution of code-collaboration among developers and with the ecosystem's organizational networks over the TF lifespan. These involved organizations play a particularly critical role in development. The research also looks at productivity, homophily, development, and diversity among developers. The results deepen the understanding of OSS communities' collaborative developer and organization patterns. Furthermore, the study emphasizes the importance and evolution of social networks, diversity, and productivity in ecosystems.

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“…These platforms allow for a number of scholarly activities like peer review; however, most lack a preservation plan. The fact that some VCSs have already been discontinued -Gitorious (2014), Google Code (2016), among others [25] -points to the urgency of the need for a more concerted preservation effort. In addition to sustainability concerns with the platforms themselves, few workflows, tools, and processes exist for preservation of research code, as they do for other scholarly materials such as papers, data, and media [23,24,13,7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise of GitHub in Scholarly Publications

Escamilla

Klein

Cooper

et al. 2022

Linking Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries

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The definition of scholarly content has expanded to include the data and source code that contribute to a publication. While major archiving efforts to preserve conventional scholarly content, typically in PDFs (e.g., LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico), are underway, no analogous effort has yet emerged to preserve the data and code referenced in those PDFs, particularly the scholarly code hosted online on Git Hosting Platforms (GHPs). Similarly, the Software Heritage Foundation is working to archive public source code, but there is value in archiving the issue threads, pull requests, and wikis that provide important context to the code while maintaining their original URLs. In current implementations, source code and its ephemera are not preserved, which presents a problem for scholarly projects where reproducibility matters. To understand and quantify the scope of this issue, we analyzed the use of GHP URIs in the arXiv and PMC corpora from January 2007 to December 2021. In total, there were 253,590 URIs to GitHub, SourceForge, Bitbucket, and GitLab repositories across the 2.66 million publications in the corpora. We found that GitHub, GitLab, SourceForge, and Bitbucket were collectively linked to 160 times in 2007 and 76,746 times in 2021. In 2021, one out of five publications in the arXiv corpus included a URI to GitHub. The complexity of GHPs like GitHub is not amenable to conventional Web archiving techniques. Therefore, the growing use of GHPs in scholarly publications points to an urgent and growing need for dedicated efforts to archive their holdings in order to preserve research code and its scholarly ephemera.

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Forge++: The Changing Landscape of FLOSS Development

Cited by 6 publications

References 16 publications

Lean GHTorrent: GitHub data on demand

Lean GHTorrent: GitHub data on demand

Organizational Influencers in Open-Source Software Projects

The Rise of GitHub in Scholarly Publications

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