The market for open source: An intelligent virtual open source marketplace

Abstract

This paper describes the MARKOS (the MARKet for Open Source) European Project, a FP7-ICT-2011-8 STREP project, which aims to realize a service and an interactive application providing an integrated view on the open source projects available on the web, focusing on functional, structural, and licenses aspects of software source code. MARKOS involves 7 partners from 5 countries, including industries, universities, and research institutions. MARKOS differs from other services available on the Web - which often provide textual-based code search - in that it provides the possibility to browse the code structure at a high level of abstraction, in order to facilitate the understanding of the software from a technical point of view. Also, it highlights relationships between software components released by different projects, giving an integrated view of the available Open Source software at a global scale. Last, but not least, MARKOS is able to highlight potential legal issues due to license incompatibilities, providing explanations for these issues and supporting developers in the search for alternative solutions to their problems. MARKOS will involve end users in order to allow to practice its results in scenarios coming from industrial and Open Source communities

How do API changes trigger stack overflow discussions? a study on the Android SDK

“…We analyzed 35,703 developers' commits submitted between September 2009 to January 2013, and having a total of 370,180 method changes. We used a code analyzer developed in the context of the Markos European project [10] to compare the APIs before and after each commit at a fine-grained level of granularity. In particular, while the Git logs just report the changes in a commit at file level granularity, we used the Markos code analyzer to capture changes at method level, and to categorize them in four types: (i) generic changes (including all kinds of changes); (ii) changes applied to the method body; (iii) changes applied to the method signature (i.e., visibility change, return type change, parameter added, parameter removed, parameter type change, method rename); and (iv) changes applied to the set of exceptions thrown by the methods.…”

License Usage and Changes: A Large-Scale Study of Java Projects on GitHub

“…Once the Git repositories had been cloned, we used a code analyzer developed in the context of the MARKOS European project [9] to extract license information at commit-level granularity. The MARKOS code analyzer uses the Ninka license classifier [21] to identify and classify licenses contained in all the files hosted under the versioning system of each project.…”

When and why developers adopt and change software licenses

“…We relied upon the MARKOS code analyzer [7] to extract the licensing throughout each project's revision history. The code analyzer incorporates the Ninka license classifier [16] in order to identify the licensing statements and classify the license by family and version (when applicable) for each file.…”