What do developers talk about open source software licensing?

Kapitsaki, Georgia M.; Papoutsoglou, Maria; Germán, Daniel M.; Angelis, Lefteris

doi:10.1109/seaa51224.2020.00022

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Comparing our results with the results of the topic modeling in the initial version of our work, we see that common categories and topics can be found (e.g. specific licenses, general OSS, linking, derivative and modifications), whereas repositories is a new topic that may be linked with the addition of SO to the dataset [9]. Not all licensing topics appear with the same frequency in users' questions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

“…It has 6,697 questions and 11,596 answers from the four Stack Exchange sites and the relevant answers after the respective filtering was applied (Table 3) and is available on Zenodo 10 . The questions from some sites have a smaller size than the dataset used in the existing work with the initial analysis [9], as in that work other general keywords were also used for data collection purposes and manual filtering was not performed.…”

Section: Dataset Filtering (Phase 3)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The topic analysis was performed on the questions, considering the text of the question body. We followed a different approach than the initial publication where both questions and answers text was analysed together, in order to be able to focus on the practitioner's questions and discuss the topics appearance in relation to the answers received [9].…”

Section: Rq2 Which Are the Most Frequent Topics Appearing In Oss Lice...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An initial analysis on licensing questions and answers texts using 3 Stack Exchange sites has been performed in our previous work [9]. In this work, we extend our dataset by considering Stack Overflow as an additional source and we investigate new research questions but with stricter criteria for inclusion in the dataset.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

An analysis of open source software licensing questions in Stack Exchange sites

Papoutsoglou¹,

Kapitsaki²,

Germán³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Free and open source software is widely used in the creation of software systems, whereas many organisations choose to provide their systems as open source. Open source software carries licenses that determine the conditions under which the original software can be used. Appropriate use of licenses requires relevant expertise by the practitioners, and has an important legal angle. Educators and employers need to ensure that developers have the necessary training to understand licensing risks and how they can be addressed. At the same time, it is important to understand which issues practitioners face when they are using a specific open source license, when they are developing new open source software products or when they are reusing open source software. In this work, we examine questions posed about open source software licensing using data from the following Stack Exchange sites: Stack Overflow, Software Engineering, Open Source and Law. We analyse the indication of specific licenses and topics in the questions, investigate the attention the posts receive and trends over time, whether appropriate answers are provided and which type of questions are asked. Our results indicate that practitioners need, among other, clarifications about licensing specific software when other licenses are used, and for understanding license content. The results of the study can be useful for educators and employers, organisations that are authoring open source software licenses and developers for understanding the issues faced when using licenses, whereas they are relevant to other software engineering research areas, such as software reusability.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 57%

Section: Dataset Filtering (Phase 3)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Rq2 Which Are the Most Frequent Topics Appearing In Oss Lice...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

An analysis of open source software licensing questions in Stack Exchange sites

Papoutsoglou¹,

Kapitsaki²,

Germán³

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A topic model is an unsupervised method which assigns topics to documents. This approach has been applied to data from technical contexts including GitHub pull requests [14], Stack Overflow Q&A and other Stack Exchange sites [15]- [17], and Gitter [18]. These sources focus on specific aspects of the software development process, and the resulting corpora are oriented towards technical themes.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mining DEV for social and technical insights about software development

Papoutsoglou,

Wachs,

Kapitsaki

2021

Preprint

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Software developers are social creatures: they communicate, collaborate, and promote their work in a variety of channels. Twitter, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and other platforms offer developers opportunities to network and exchange ideas. Researchers analyze content on these sites to learn about trends and topics in software engineering. However, insight mined from the text of Stack Overflow questions or GitHub issues is highly focused on detailed and technical aspects of software development. In this paper, we present a relatively new online community for software developers called DEV. On DEV users write long-form posts about their experiences, preferences, and working life in software, zooming out from specific issues and files to reflect on broader topics. About 50,000 users have posted over 140,000 articles related to software development. In this work, we describe the content of posts on DEV using a topic model, showing that developers discuss a rich variety and mixture of social and technical aspects of software development. We show that developers use DEV to promote themselves and their work: 83% link their profiles to their GitHub profiles and 56% to their Twitter profiles. 14% of users pin specific GitHub repos in their profiles. We argue that DEV is emerging as an important hub for software developers, and a valuable source of insight for researchers to complement data from platforms like GitHub and Stack Overflow.

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