Coordinating open-source software development

Abstract

Open-source software (OSS) projects are arguably the quintessential example of distributed software development, with their openness to a large pool of world-wide contributors and their loose organizational structure. To cope with the demands which this openness and fluidity place on the development process, open-source projects have evolved their own methods and organization. This paper looks at the ways some of the major and most successful OSS projects deal with the issue of coordination among their many contributors. Although each of the projects examined in this paper developed some unique practices, there are also significant commonalities. The paper then goes on to indicate some of the problems caused by the existing practices and puts forward some possible approaches to OSS coordination that could make OSS development more efficient.