Open Source Software

Competency Leader

Open Source Software Research at Lero

Lero are very involved in open source software (OSS) research for many years. Specifically through several major EU FP6/FP7 projects:

COSPA (Consortium for Open Source in Public Administrations);
CALIBRE (Coordination Action for Libre Software)
OPAALS (Open Philosophies for Associative Autopoietic digitaL ecosystemS
NEXOF (NESSI Open Service Framework)

This research has been led by Professor Brian Fitzgerald, currently Vice President Research at the University of Limerick, and holder of the Frederick A Krehbiel II Chair in Innovation in Global Business and Technology. He has authored one of the early books on the topic, Understanding Open Source Software Development (Addison-Wesley, 2002). This has become the second most cited book on open source software (Eric Raymond being most cited). He has received two ‘Best Paper’ awards for his OSS research – at the very prestigious International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in 2000 and at the inaugural First International Conference on Open Source Systems in 2005.

Prof Fitzgerald is the Founding Chair of the IFIP Working Group 2.13 on Open Source Software To date, he has published four books and 18 peer-reviewed papers in international journals on the OSS topic He has also been guest editor for four international journal special issues which were dedicated to the OSS topic. Together with Joseph Feller at University College Cork and US colleagues, Karim Lakhani at MIT and Scott Hissam at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, he has been co-chair for a series of very successful workshops on the topic at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) from 2001-2006. He has also co-edited a book with these colleagues, Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software(MIT Press, 2005), with contributed chapters from the leading researchers in Europe and the US, and from pioneers in the field such as Paul David, Rishab Ghosh, Bob Glass, Eric von Hippel, Laurence Lessig, Peter Neumann, Tim O’Reilly and David Parnas.

The Lero group has been particularly prominent in studying the process of organisational adoption of adoption, both success and failure (Fitzgerald 2009), and Lero research has been the first to label and study certain OSS phenomena, such as OSS 2.0 (Fitzgerald 2006), open source service networks (Feller et al 2007) and open-sourcing. (Agerfalk and Fitzgerald 2008).