Submission deadline: April 1st 2019
Publication date: Nov./Dec. 2019

Open Source Software (OSS) has conquered the software world; you can see it almost everywhere, from Internet infrastructure to mobile phones to the desktop. But not only that; although many of the OSS practices were seen with skepticism 20 years ago, many have become mainstream in software engineering nowadays: from development tools such as git to practices such as modern code reviews. In the programmer community, OSS has become so prevalent that some companies now expect potential employees to have an active GitHub profile which showcases their OSS contributions.

For a phenomenon with as much impact on software development practice as OSS, it is of crucial importance that we understand what works, what doesn't, and why. While researchers and practitioners have studied and discussed about OSS for many years, we still do not have a complete understanding of it as a whole or of the many aspects that are related to it. Akin to the famous quote about Wikipedia “The problem with Wikipedia [read OSS] is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work”, we see OSS impact our lives every day, yet there is only a very limited number of theories about OSS which can describe, explain or predict how OSS impacts software engineering practice.

Practitioners can ascertain that OSS is an evolving environment that has changed much in the last 20 years. Scholars talk of three generations of OSS: a first one where a community of volunteers led the development process, a second one where the software industry started to interact with the community, and a third one where industry consortia are pushing forward OSS projects with a significant amount of professional (i.e., paid) developers. And there is an increasing interest in OSS from the perspective of industrial practitioners, noticeable not only by the paid developers, but the rising number of previously closed source projects being open-sourced recently.

The goal of this theme issue of IEEE Software is therefore to share with software engineering practitioners reports that analyze those OSS products, processes, practices and tools that have had major influence in software engineering practice. It is important for the software engineering community to benefit from the insights of having an overview of the realities, promises, generalization and pitfalls of OSS.

We refer to Open Source in a wide sense as in IEEE Software’s 2004 article by Gacek and Arief [1], which augments and contains both the Open Source Definition by the Open Source Initiative [2] and the Definition of Free Software by the Free Software Foundation [3].

Topics will include, but not limited to:
  * Software development tools and platforms
  * Open Source Software products and their adoption
  * Economic and business aspects
  * Legal aspects
  * Quality issues
  * Global software development
  * Software ecosystems
  * Release management
  * Social software development
  * Sociotechnical points of view
  * Software analytics
  * Programming languages
  * Innersource
  * Modern/public code review
  * Software heritage
  * Diversity
  * Good/best practices

Besides seeking regular-length articles, we also seek short experience reports from practitioners. These reports don’t need to make a research contribution but should instead present the experiences of practitioners or tool developers that share their practical insights and experience related to the topic focusing on challenges faced, solutions attempted, and results obtained.

References

[1] Gacek, C., & Arief, B. (2004). The many meanings of open source. IEEE software, 21(1), 34-40.
[2] OSI: The Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd
[3] FSF: What is Free Software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Questions?

For more information about the focus, contact the guest editors:
  * Gregorio Robles, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain), grex@gsyc.urjc.es
  * Igor Steinmacher, Northern Arizona University (United States), igorfs@utfpr.edu.br
  * Paul Adams, Zalando GmbH (Germany), paul.adams@zalando.de
  * Christoph Treude, University of Adelaide (Australia), christoph.treude@adelaide.edu.au

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts must not exceed 3,000 words, including figures and tables, which count for 250 words each. Submissions in excess of these limits may be rejected without refereeing. The articles we deem within the theme and scope will be peer reviewed and are subject to editing for magazine style, clarity, organization, and space. We reserve the right to edit the title of all submissions. Be sure to include the name of the theme you’re submitting for.

Articles should have a practical orientation and be written in a style accessible to practitioners. Overly complex, purely research-oriented or theoretical treatments aren’t appropriate. Articles should be novel. IEEE Software doesn’t republish material published previously in other venues, including other periodicals and formal conference or workshop proceedings, whether previous publication was in print or electronic form.

For general author guidelines: www.computer.org/software/author.htm
For submission details: software@computer.org
To submit an article: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sw-cs