Abstract
Although much of the research on the libre (free, open source) phenomenon has been focused on the involvement of volunteers, the role of companies is also important in many projects. In fact, during the last years, the involvement of companies in the libre software world seems to be raising. In this paper we present an study that shows, quantitatively, how important this involvement is in the production of the largest collection of code available for Linux: the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. By studying copyright attributions in source code, we have identified those companies with more attributed code, and the trend of corporate presence in Debian from 1998 to 2004.
This work has been funded in part by the European Commission, under the FLOSSMETRICS (FP6-IST-5-033547) and FLOSSWORLD (FP6-IST-015722) projects.
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Robles, G., Dueñas, S., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M. (2007). Corporate Involvement of Libre Software: Study of Presence in Debian Code over Time. In: Feller, J., Fitzgerald, B., Scacchi, W., Sillitti, A. (eds) Open Source Development, Adoption and Innovation. OSS 2007. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing, vol 234. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-72486-7_10
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