Regensburg 2010 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 12: Social Systems, Opinion and Group Dynamics II

SOE 12.1: Invited Talk

Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 09:30–10:15, H44

The hidden complexity of open source software — •Frank Schweitzer — Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Kreuzplatz 5, 8032 Zurich, Switzerland

Open source software (OSS) can be seen as a evolving complex network. On the structural level the nodes are given by software modules (such as classes), whereas the links between nodes may describe the type of connection (such as usage or inheritance). This network is highly dynamic because of the addition/deletion of nodes or links and the propagation of changes. Understanding the development of OSS puts a challenge on different sciences: physics, to reveal the structural features and the abstract dynamics of the network; computer science, to elucidate the software engineering principles underlying OSS; economics/management sciences, to understand the social interaction of developers and users. In this talk, using a highly data driven approach, we analyse the community dynamics in more than 100 projects, the dependency structure and the change records of 35 Java projects and the evolution of the dependency network. Our investigations show remarkable regularities in the structure and dynamics of OSS which can be reproduced by simple models, this way challenging established paradigms in software engineering.