Re: Open source software research

["A. Gunes Koru" <gkoru engr smu edu>]

Luis,

Thank you very much for your cooperation. I think there are several
reasons for the lack of interest. first of all, research community is
relatively small with respect to development people.In addition, people
doing research didn't focus on empirical software engineering as I
mentioned in the previous e-mail. Besides, for many years, people were
suspicious about the outcome of open source projects. They thought it is
just hacking around and it will not produce really useful results.
Researchers thought they could convince the reviewers of papers, or
conference committees better if they use industrial data. The way and
philosopy of open source projects were so contradicted to the controlled
company-setting environments that available data were simply ignored as
"not valuable data" similar to "uncontrolled experiments"  instead of
trying to understand the changing parameters in the open-source context.  
A very simple another reason is that some people are not fond of sharing
they are more on the intellectual property and patents side and they
prefer to be ignorent.

Again, thanks for your interest. I'll send my questions separately.

Gunes

On 4 Sep 2002, Luis Villa wrote:

> On Wed, 2002-09-04 at 13:31, A. Gunes Koru wrote:
> > Yet, to do some research in this direction, I need to ask questions about
> > how these data have been collected and I need some further information
> > about the context. Do you know any people who can be interested in this
> > and answer my questions? Or is this list the right place to raise these
> > kinds of questions. I appreciate any reply. My contact information is at
> > the bottom.
> 
> This is a fairly good place to ask such questions. If you want to speak
> to specific people, I'm probably the best resource GNOME has at this
> time. 
> 
> Luis (surprised no one has tried to data mine b.g.o earlier)
> 

-- 
***************************************************************************

A. Gunes Koru

Research Assistant, Ph.D. Student

Southern Methodist University
Computer Science and Engineering Department
Science and Information Building Room 317
Dallas, TX 75205


Home: 214 691 5633
Work: 214 768 2005
Cell: 214 893 7311
http://www.seas.smu.edu/~gkoru
Email: gkoru engr smu edu

***************************************************************************