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Slide 1: Corporate Involvement in FLOSS Study of Presence in Debian Code over Time Gregorio Robles, Santiago Dueñas, Jesús González-Barahona Universidad Rey Juan Carlos libresoft.urjc.es Limerick, June 13th 2007    
Slide 2: Introduction & Motivation  FLOSS landscape has a high variety of participants: individuals, universities, foundations... and, of course, companies!  Companies in FLOSS have already been studied, especially focusing on the – – – – Why? (Building a community, marketing...) How? (Business models, etc.) Where? (Software domains...) ...
Slide 3: Goal & Research Questions  To measure the involvement of companies in FLOSS, specifically of those that deliver code to the community – – – – How much is the involvement of companies? Has it changed over time? How many companies? Who are the main actors?
Slide 4: The Means  Analyze – source code available in Debian for contribution of companies More than 10,000 source code packages in Debian 3.1  We will apply our methodology from Debian 2.0 (1998) to Debian 3.1 (2005)
Slide 5: Looking for contributions  Scanning for copyright statements  Companies have a high motivation to be the copyright holders!
Slide 6: Methodology   File – selection: Source code files >30 programming languages  'Ownergrep': Heuristic looking for ©  Cleaning, multiple entries & merging  Avoid double counting
Slide 7: The 'ownergrep'  Regular  expression .*copyright (?:\(c\))?[\d\,\-\s\:]+(?:by\s+)?([^\d]*) – Ownergrep algorithm based on one by Rishab A. Ghosh and Vipul Prakash
Slide 8: Cleaning & Multiple entries  Ad-hoc – heuristics of joint © statements lower case, removing white spaces, dots, etc. Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis IBM corporation and others  Splitting – –  But... – the same copyright holder may appear in (many) different ways! They should really be merged into a unique one
Slide 9: Example: IBM Corporation  international business machines inc ibm deutschland entwicklung gmbh, ibm corporation international business machines corp international business machines corporation and ibm corp ibm deutschland entwicklung gmbh international business machines, inc  international business machines corporation international business machines corp ibm crop international business machines ibm entwicklung gmbh, ibm corporation ibm ibm deutschland ... and 7 other ways!             
Slide 10: (Avoiding) Double counting  Using a hash for each file  Not 2-to-2, but only on same filenames
Slide 11: Results  Contribution is doubled every 2 years  Companies – have been verified manually!! by means of Google searches (thanks Diego!)
Slide 12: Companies vs. rest (with care)
Slide 13: Top10-contributing Companies  Debian  Sarge  2005 3.1
Slide 14: Top10-contributing Companies  Debian  Hamm  1998 2.0
Slide 15: Hall Of Fame  SUN (1,2,2,2,1)  Netscape (X,1,1,X,7)  Silicon Graphics (3,4,4,5,4)  IBM (X,X,6,1,2)  Xerox (4,6,10,X,X)  [Other top companies can be found in the paper]
Slide 16: Summing up  Approach to quantify the contribution that companies give back to the community  Threats to validity: – – use of heuristics: ownergrep, cleaning, merging completeness (use of © statements)  Source code by companies gets doubled every two years!  Share of contribution has almost maintained constant over the last 7 years
Slide 17: Any questions? Thanks for your attendance and interest! More information is available at http://libresoft.urjc.es