Your interesting published article “Erratum to: The single-vendor commercial open source business model” drives me to call for new papers and honorary reviewer, on behalf of Computer Communication & Collaboration, which is an English quarterly journal in Canada.

Oh well… And I’m still annoyed about Springer changing my paper title on their own will.

Context / Objectives

Over the past decade, the Open Source Software (OSS) phenomenon has had a global impact on the way software systems and software-based services are developed, distributed and deployed. Widely acknowledged benefits of OSS include reliability, low development and maintenance costs, as well as rapid code turnover. Linux distributions, Apache and MySQL server, and Moodle LMS are, among many other examples, a testimony to its success and resilience.

However, state-of-the-art OSS, by the very nature of its open, unconventional, distributed development model, makes software quality assessment, let alone full certification, particularly hard to achieve and raises important challenges both from the technical/methodological and the managerial points of view. This makes the use of OSS, and, in particular, its integration within complex industrial-strength applications, with stringent security requirements, a risk but also an opportunity and a challenge for rigorous methods in software analysis and engineering.

Moreover, OSS communities are, at heart, learning communities formed by people that share the same values, passion, and interest for software development. From this perspective, OSS is the product of a highly diverse, highly distributed collaboration effort. Looking through the glass, the multifaceted aspects of these dynamically evolving, loosely structured OSS communities require an expansion of the typical certification process, beyond traditional frameworks and towards a multidisciplinary approach that would take into account, not only technical, but also social, psychological, and educational aspects at individual and community level. Such a certification process could potentially increase participation and enhance visibility.

In such a context, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from Academia and Industry who are broadly interested in (a) the quality assessment of OSS projects, and (b) metrics, procedures, and tools that could be useful in assessing and qualifying individual participation and collaboration patterns in OSS communities.

Contributions to the workshop are expected to present foundations, methods, tools and case studies that use and possibly integrate technique from different areas such as:

• product and process certification;
• formal modelling;
• formal verification: model checking and theorem proving;
• reverse engineering;
• static analysis, testing and inspection;
• safety, security and usability analysis;
• language design and evolving systems;
• automated source code analyses;
• software evolution and reconfigurability;
• data mining and text mining;
• ontology engineering;
• knowledge management;
• cloud computing;
• analytical models for the OSS development process;
• social constructivism in OSS communities;
• OSS communities as peer-production models;
• collaborative learning and OSS communities;
• action research;
• empirical studies.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: 15 June 2013
Notification of acceptance/rejection: 20 July 2013
Camera-ready copy for pre-proceedings: 6 Sept 2013
Camera-ready copy for post-proceedings: 15 Oct 2013

Workshop date: 23 September 2013

We encourage the pre-submission of title and abstract by 8 June 2013 (not mandatory)

Information to authors

Authors are invited to submit, via Easychair https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=opencert2013, English-language research contributions or experience reports.

There are two categories of submissions

• Short papers: up to 6 pages for submission (and up to 8 pages for post-proceedings camera-ready).
• Regular papers: between 12 and 16 pages for submission (and between 12 and 18 pages for post-proceedings camera-ready).

The program committee may reject papers that are outside these lengths on the grounds of length alone. Submissions have to be prepared using LNCS style. Submitted papers will be refereed for quality, correctness, originality, and relevance. Notification and reviews will be communicated via email. Accepted papers will be included in the workshop programme and will appear in the workshop pre-proceedings.

Accepted regular papers and a selection of accepted short papers will be published after the Workshop by Springer in a volume of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (http://www.springer.com/lncs), which will collect contributions to some workshops and symposia co-located with SEFM 2013. Condition for inclusion in the post-proceedings is that at least one of the co-authors has presented the paper at the Workshop. Pre-proceedings will be available online before the Workshop.

A special issue with selected papers may be planned, depending on the number and quality of submissions.

Organising Committee

Luis S. Barbosa
Dep Informatics
Universidade do Minho
Campus de Gualtar
4710-057 Braga – Portugal
Email: lsb@di.uminho.pt

Antonio Cerone
UNU-IIST
PO Box 3058
Macau SAR China
Ph.: +853-2871-2930
Fax: +853-2871-2940
Email: antonio@iist.unu.edu

Program Committee

• Pantelis M. Papadopoulos, UNU-IIST, Macau SAR, China (PC co-chair)
• Bruno Rossi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy (PC co-chair)
• Bernhard Aichernig, Technical University of Graz, Austria
• Luis Barbosa, University of Minho, Portugal
• Jaap Boender, Middlesex University London, UK
• Peter Breuer, University of Birmingham, UK
• Andrea Capiluppi, Brunel University, UK
• Antonio Cerone, UNU-IIST, Macau SAR, China
• Stavros Demetriadis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
• Yannis Dimitriadis, University of Valladolid, Spain
• Gabriella Dodero, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
• George Eleftherakis, CITY College, Greece
• Jose Emilio Labra Gayo, University of Oviedo, Spain
• Fabrizio Fabbrini, ISTI-CNR, Italy
• Joao F. Ferreira, Teesside University, UK
• Jesus Arias Fisteus, Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain
• Imed Hammouda, Tampere University of Technology, Finland
• Maria Joao Frade, University of Minho, Portugal
• Andreas Karatsolis, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Qatar
• Paddy Krishnan, Oracle Labs, Australia
• Thomas Lagkas, CITY College, Greece
• Martin Michlmayr, University of Cambridge, UK
• Paolo Milazzo, University of Pisa, Italy
• Jose Miranda, MULTICERT S.A., Portugal
• John Noll, Lero – the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, Ireland
• David von Oheimb, Siemens AG, Germany
• Jose Nuno Oliveira, University of Minho, Portugal
• Alexander K. Petrenko, ISP RAS, Russia
• Simon Pickin, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
• Dirk Riehle, University of Erlangen-Nurnberg, Germany
• Gregorio Robles, King Juan Carlos University, Spain
• Alejandro Sanchez, Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Argentina
• Siraj Ahmed Shaikh, Coventry University, UK
• Ioannis Stamelos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
• Ralf Treinen, Paris Diderot University, France
• Tanja Vos, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain
• Tony Wasserman, Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, USA

With technology, I mean bureaucratic practices, conceptual modeling of the world and Wikipedia content, and software tools to support changes to those models.

First, who made the decision to move the articles on female novelists to an “American Women Novelist” category? Wikipedia bureaucracy is structured into “improvement projects”, groups of volunteers who care about a particular topic, and work together to improve this topic’s presentation on Wikipedia. It is part of the large bureaucratic underbelly of Wikipedia that few care to look at (who are not editors). So in most cases, there would be an American Novelist improvement group. Any complaints should be directed to that group. (And not the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit which operates Wikipedia. The various Wikipedia communities have been very clear that they don’t want the Wikimedia Foundation to meddle with content. As a consequence, the Wikimedia Foundation only interferes with grave violations of conduct or if laws are being violated.) In this particular case, I have not been able to figure out who actually is behind these changes. Anyway, let’s assume there is such an improvement project.

This group decided that “American Women Novelists” is a good new category. The original motivation was to keep categories small, which may or may not have been a reasonable decision. But the choice of the category term shows all the things that are wrong with the category system, leading to wrong or misleading labeling, and [sarcasm on] may well lead to war between nations in the future [sarcasm off] as Wikipedia may become the oracle of all things knowledge.

The first thing that is wrong is that next to “American Women Novelists” there obviously should be “American Men Novelists”. I’m sure there should also be an “American Other Novelists” category to not exclude the LGBT community. That third term is obviously clumsy and makes clear that a better choice of name would have been “female/male/other American Novelists”.

Considering this, it becomes clear that the category name mixes various things. “Novelist” as a role people play, “female/male/other” as properties of people, and the implicit classification that the article is about a person (as derived from the role “novelist” which applies to humans only and not to mammals or cities or t-shirts). If the current approach was a proper approach to classification, a growing body of knowledge on Wikipedia would soon have us introducing categories like “tall slender blonde other American Novelist”. (I trust the common sense of the respective improvement project not to follow this example.)

A more thorough approach to categorizing the content of articles on Wikipedia would rely on a model of content categories. For articles about people, the central concept would likely be person, an identifiable object, with roles that a person performs in various contexts, for example, mother or father, novelist or publisher or bartender or race car driver or nurse. Properties like male or female, birth day or age would be broken out and attached to the appropriate concept, whether a central or auxilliary concept. In fact, the Wiki Data project tries to do just that.

Computer science is a discipline that has long worked on such challenges. There are two main approaches, a more rigid and precise one (conceptual modeling or object-orientation), and a fast-and-loose one based on graph theory (ontologies). The second one is the one being favored by Wikipedia. I’m in the first camp and believe that a model should have defined semantics, but I recognize the value that the second approach provides, namely that you don’t have to think too deeply while making changes. Wikipedia is always “good enough” and where it isn’t, you fix it up after the fact rather than getting it right immediately.

Which brings me to tool support, finally. In Wikipedia, categories are just textual labels. There could be anything in there. A single typo and you fall out of the category. Today, there is no single place where you could change a category name. Rather, you need to send out a group of volunteers to look at every page and change the label by hand. This easily can take days if not weeks. This is why in the sexism debate, the original reporter complained about a gradual change rather than suddenly being confronted with an instantaneous change. The way the Wikipedia technology has been built, such changes can’t be implemented instantaneously.

Over at the Sweble project, my research group has been developing technology that lets editors make wide-ranging changes like renaming a category at the click of a button.

This includes instantaneously reverting mistakes.

PS: My Ph.D. student wants me to note that his work has been tested in the laboratory only and not on the real Wikipedia. We use a different underlying technology (Java rather than php) so adapting our work to Wikipedia would take substantial effort.

Keywords: Open source; open source license; software license; open source project growth

Reference: Gottfried Hofmann, Dirk Riehle, Carsten Kolassa, Wolfgang Mauerer. “A Dual Model of Open Source License Growth.” In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2013). Springer Verlag, 2013, to appear.

The paper is available as a PDF file.

Keywords: Commercial open source; software product features

Reference: Florian Weikert, Dirk Riehle. “A Model of Commercial Open Source Software Product Features.” In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB 2013). Springer Verlag, 2013, to appear.

The paper is available as a PDF file.

OC13 – Open Commons Kongress

14.05.2013, 9:00 – 16:30 Uhr

Wissensturm Linz, Austria

Lernen und Leben mit digitalen Gemeingütern

Zum zweiten Mal veranstaltet die Johannes Kepler Universität Linz und die Open Commons Region Linz den Open Commons Kongress. Der heurige Titel lautet “OC13: Lernen und Leben mit digitalen Gemeingütern”. Die Veranstaltung findet am Dienstag, 14. Mai im Wissensturm statt.

Read on…

October 23–26, 2013—Allerton Park, Monticello, IL, USA

The International Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs

April 1994: Members of the small, eclectic, and informal Hillside group gathered in Ben Lomond, California, for their yearly retreat and in the redwoods that Spring hatched a plan that was PLoP 1994. In response to the criticism that by putting together such an unconventional conference they would show they didn’t know what they were doing, one of them suggested, “then let’s pretend to know.”

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, PLoP in 2013 will return to its first home, Allerton Park, and the conference program will include a variety of special events alongside the usual PLoP fare.

This is your invitation to participate—to share your knowledge, to help others improve their understanding and their pattern languages, and to be helped in turn. PLoP’s focus encompasses every aspect of software: design, programming, testing, architecture, user interface design, domain modeling, education, human relations, and software development processes. Patterns and pattern languages for domains outside software have always been welcome, and this year, PLoP 2013 especially invites contributions that reflect on the history, current practice, and future of patterns.

Newcomer or oldtimer, all are welcome, and this year we expect to see familiar faces from the past: founders, early participants, and people who form the stuff of legend. Help us start up the future: From redwoods to prairie to…?

Submissions

PLoP accepts papers containing patterns or pattern languages as well as experience reports and papers related to the theory and use of patterns. You also can submit proposals for free-format discussion groups or workshops that bring together people interested in a (hot) topic related to patterns. Proposals addressing interdisciplinary topics and topics from domains other than software development are encouraged. Non-conventional formats are welcome.

Submission deadline for initial paper: May 19, 2013
Submission deadline for focus group proposals and workshops: July 28, 2013

Submissions should fall into one of the following categories:

• Pattern Papers
  Short papers (5–10 pages) containing one or more patterns. Longer papers containing pattern languages or sequence as well as work-in-progress papers will be considered. All accepted papers receive in-depth shepherding by an experienced pattern author before the conference. Long papers might have only a portion shepherded and workshopped. Papers may receive further shepherding at the conference.

• Papers on Applying Patterns
  Papers on the practical application of patterns. The focus of these papers should be either on applying patterns to industrial projects, education, and organizations, or on systematizing the application of patterns. They should stimulate discussion on how better to disseminate patterns in higher education, training, and practice.

• Essay or Classical Style Papers
  Essays and classical papers. Some pattern papers don’t fit the traditional pattern. Papers in this category can be essay, classical technical papers, or articles.

• Focus Group Proposals
  Focus groups: free-format discussion groups or workshops lasting approximately three hours. Focus groups bring together people interested in a challenging (hot) topic related to patterns. Non-conventional ideas such as goldfish bowls and renga circles are welcome.

• Pattern Workshops
  Half-day workshops. In addition to the Focus Groups, PLoP 2013 invites ideas for half-day workshops on a (hot) topic with a pattern focus.

Submission Procedure

The core of PLoP is the Writers’ Workshop, where authors work together to improve their papers. Before papers are accepted for a Writers’ Workshop, they are shepherded. Shepherding is an iterative process, where an experienced author discusses the submission with its authors to refine the paper prior to the conference. All submissions are peer-reviewed after shepherding.

Following shepherding, papers may be accepted directly into a Writers’ Workshop or alternatively, into a Writing Group. Writing Group papers will receive additional face-to-face shepherding at the conference. Writing Group papers reaching a required standard will be considered for workshop review on the final day of the conference.

PLoP proceedings are published after the conference through the ACM Digital Library. Papers discussed at a Writers’ Workshop at PLoP qualify for submission to the new journal Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming published by Springer.

There is a three-stage submission process for the conference:

1. Initial submissions are assessed for suitability. Papers judged suitable are assigned a shepherd who will help its authors improve the paper.
2. Authors are expected to submit a second draft part way through the shepherding process. After shepherding, each paper will be assessed for quality and its authors’ willingness to accept feedback. This review will determine whether a paper is accepted to the conference.
3. Authors and shepherds are expected to continue revising their paper until the final drafts are due.

To submit your paper, please visit the PLoP 2013 submission page.

At least one of the authors of each accepted paper must register for the conference before the close of early-bird registration. Failure to do so may result in acceptance being withdrawn.

For more information, please visit: http://hillside.net/plop/2013/

I am looking forward to reading your submissions, learning about the patterns that you have observed, and to meeting you in Allerton Park. Welcome to PLoP 2013!

On behalf of PLoP 2013 and the Hillside Group,

Christian Köppe
Conference Chair

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline May 19, 2013
• Start of shepherding June 2, 2013
• Second draft due for review July 28, 2013
• Deadline focus group / workshop proposals July 28, 2013
• Notification of acceptance August 7, 2013
• Early registration ends September 15, 2013
• Conference versions due September 26, 2013
• Patterns boot-camp October 23, 2013
• PLoP conference days October 23-26, 2013
• Proceedings version due January 2014

Open source software is publicly developed software. Thus, for the first time, we can broadly analyse in data-driven detail how people program, how bugs come about, and how we could improve our tools. In this talk, I’ll review six years of our open source empirical (data) research and highlight the most interesting insights, including how different (or not) open source is from closed source programming.

Let me know if you are interested!

OpenSym is the conference for open collaboration researchers and practitioners, including free/libre/open source software, but also open access, open data, open government, and open innovation. OpenSym 2013 will be held for the first time in 2013, on Aug 5-7, in Hong Kong, China. OpenSym joins hands with WikiSym, an established conference that brings together wiki and Wikipedia researchers and practitioners. WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 will co-locate with Wikimania 2013, the Wikipedia (and related) user conference.

OpenSym is unique in bringing together all strands of “open researchers” and I can’t wait to see how it works out! It is truly an exciting time to experience how researchers and practitioners join hands across disciplines to make the world a better place!

All calls for submissions can be found on the WS+OS 2013 website at http://opensym.org/os2013/submitting. This includes the research tracks

• Call for Papers: Open Collaboration (Wikis, Social Media, etc.) Research Track
• Call for Papers: Wikipedia (and related) Research Track
• Call for Papers: Open Access, Open Data, and Open Government Research Track
• Call for Papers: Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Research Track

as well as the community track (experience reports, workshops, tutorials, panels, demos, etc.) and the doctoral symposium:

• Call for Submissions: Community Track
• Call for Applications: Doctoral Symposium

See you in Hong Kong, on Aug 5-7, 2013!

I think this is a bad idea. Why? Some may feel they are being spied upon: They are not anonymous visitors any longer, the store is communicating they know something about you. When I enter a store and I’m asked: “Where are you from?” I can always lie. If I’m asked that question on a flea market somewhere I’d certainly do so: “I’m from Kazakhstan, derive from a long family of Mafiosi, and don’t you dare to double the asking price because you think I’m from Germany.”

The intention of the website is mostly likely a good one: To give me an easy shopping experience. I don’t have to convert from NZD to EUR myself. However, I wonder for how many international shoppers this is a real problem? Instead, the site creates the suspicion of price discrimination: Depending on where I’m from, I may have to pay more. This may not be true in this case, but I wonder about it, as may many others.

Here is another site that quotes me in Euros. I enjoy Royal Selangor’s products, but in this case I know that I’m paying a higher price if I order from Europe. Not only will I have to pay shipping, customs, and VAT, the EUR prices are also significantly higher than the Malaysian prices. Royal Selangor has a lot of outlets in different countries, and prices vary significantly (Malaysia, the home country, is still cheapest). Highly annoying, if you are a price-conscious shopper. At least, they disclose this information at the bottom of the page.

What’s the solution for the smart product manager and their user experience designer? Not to give up on price discrimination but to chose a different implementation strategy. Don’t create suspicion but be clear about it. A simple and effective solution is to always show the original price and then have convenience buttons for conversion right next to the original price. Or to do the conversion for the most popular currencies right away and display it.

Nobody says you can’t price-discriminate and charge people more depending on where they come from, whatever currency you display it in. Heck, Staples was recently discovered to charge different prices by county, within the same state! Personally, I think that being quoted in the original currency adds mystery and fun to international shopping, so you might even be better off. The fair website discloses that you price-discriminate.

Happy new year, 2013, everyone!