Evolution of Open-Source Code Bases (EVOSC05)

(please, feel free to forward)

http://www.sl-lab.it/~evosc05/

Theme and goals

Releasing software with an open-source license is basically an economical
or social issue. Any individual, group of 
developers, or firm may decide they could benefit from giving their users
the right to copy, modify, and distribute 
their software under the terms of a liberal licence. In most cases, this
``gift'' gives life to a community that is in 
charge of further developing the software product. These communities are
usually regulated by some sort of loose 
organization. It is often possible for anyone to join these organizations
in order to influence the evolution of the 
product by actively participating in the design and coding
process. Nevertheless, several users of open-source products 
decide not to be involved in their reference community for various reasons:
it might appear too costly, it might not be 
appealing from a strategic perspective, or it could be denied by the
community itself. Sometimes these users are just 
free riders: they decide to enjoy a piece of software just
because they can use it for free, and they depend on the developing
community to keep the product useful for them. 
However, the very essence of open-source software is that it enables custom
evolutions. Custom evolutions can be 
peripheral, when they affect marginal details of a product, or even
revolutionary when they dramatically change design 
assumptions underlying the software. If these evolutions are carried on
outside the community who drives the 
development, they produce branches that can be hard to merge back into the
main code base. 
Nevertheless, merging the 
main trunk with custom branches is often critical for inheriting evolutions
that are not at the core interest of the 
independent developer (typically security fixes, for example).

Topics

This workshop aims at sharing ideas about evolving open-source code bases,
without losing the benefit of a community 
working on the same software. We are looking for papers that describe new
approaches for dealing with custom evolutions. 
We are especially interested in techniques aimed at:

     * merging custom evolutions in a disciplined way;
     * assessing if a specific evolution is likely to be problematic;
     * deploying custom evolutions together with the standard code base;
     * managing families of custom evolutions at design, implementation,
     and deployment time

Workshop papers must be limited to 8 pages in the ACM two columns format.

Important dates [deadlines extended!]

     * Abstracts submission: 27 April 2005
     * Full paper submission: 04 May 2005
     * Acceptance notification: 20 May 2005
     * Camera-ready version: 25 May 2005
     * Workshop date: 11 July 2005

Program Committee

     * Antonio Carzaniga, University of Lugano, Switzerland
     * Renzo Davoli, Università degli Studi di Bologna, Italy
     * Elisabetta Di Nitto, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
     * Kazuhiro Fujieda, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology,
Japan
     * Harald Gall,  University of Zurich, Switzerland
     * Martin Michlmayr, University of Cambridge, UK
     * Mattia Monga, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
     * Andrea Trentini, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy


Full PDF call for papers:
http://www.sl-lab.it/~evosc05/evosc05-cfp.pdf

Please, feel free to forward this call

Thank you