Sustainability of Open Source software communities beyond a fork: How and why has the LibreOffice project evolved?

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2013.11.1077

Journal of Systems and Software

Volume 89, March 2014, Pages 128-145

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2013.11.1077 Get rights and content

Under a Creative Commons license

open access

Highlights

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First comprehensive analysis of Open Source projects involving a fork.
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The LibreOffice project, which was forked from the OpenOffice.org project, shows no sign of long-term decline.
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LibreOffice has attracted the long-term and most active committers in OpenOffice.org.
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Open Source communities can outlive Open Source software projects.
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LibreOffice is perceived by its community as supportive, diversified, and independent.

Abstract

Many organisations are dependent upon long-term sustainable software systems and associated communities. In this paper we consider long-term sustainability of Open Source software communities in Open Source software projects involving a fork. There is currently a lack of studies in the literature that address how specific Open Source software communities are affected by a fork. We report from a study aiming to investigate the developer community around the LibreOffice project, which is a fork from the OpenOffice.org project. In so doing, our analysis also covers the OpenOffice.org project and the related Apache OpenOffice project. The results strongly suggest a long-term sustainable LibreOffice community and that there are no signs of stagnation in the LibreOffice project 33 months after the fork. Our analysis provides details on developer communities for the LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice projects and specifically concerning how they have evolved from the OpenOffice.org community with respect to project activity, developer commitment, and retention of committers over time. Further, we present results from an analysis of first hand experiences from contributors in the LibreOffice community. Findings from our analysis show that Open Source software communities can outlive Open Source software projects and that LibreOffice is perceived by its community as supportive, diversified, and independent. The study contributes new insights concerning challenges related to long-term sustainability of Open Source software communities.

Keywords

Open Source software

Fork

Community evolution

Cited by (0)

Jonas Gamalielsson is a researcher at the University of Skövde's Informatics Research Centre. He has conducted research on open source and open standards in several projects. He has been involved in the Open Source Action (OSA) project (2008–2010), the Nordic (NordForsk) OSS Researchers Network (2009–2012), and the ITEA2-project OPEES (Open Platform for the Engineering of Embedded Systems). Further, he is participating in the ORIOS (Open Source based Reference implementations for Open Standards) project. He has also been involved in the Fifth and Eighth International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2009 and OSS 2012).

Björn Lundell is a senior researcher at the University of Skövde's Informatics Research Centre. He has been researching the Open Source phenomenon for several years and participated in a number of research projects in different leading roles, including: co-lead for a work package in the EU FP6 CALIBRE project (2004–2006), the technical manager in the industrial (ITEA) research project COSI (2005–2008), and is currently the project leader for the ORIOS project (2012–2015). He is a founding member of IFIP WG 2.13 on Open Source Software, and was program co-chair for the Eighth International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2012).