Keynote: The adoption of FOSS workflows in commercial software development: the case of git and github

Dr. Daniel M. German

May 8th, 15h, room 40A

In 1985 Richard Stallman published the influential GNU Manifesto, starting what we call today the Free and Open Source (FOSS) Movement. With it, Stallman initiated a new way of collaborative software development that at the time sounded quixotic. Almost 30 years later, FOSS is pervasive, running from tablets and phones all the way to some of the most powerful computers in the world. FOSS encompasses not only the software, but also a social, cultural and philosophical movement, and a set of software development practices. 

In this talk I'll describe how some of the software development practices of FOSS are been adopted by non-FOSS organizations and their developers. In particular, I'll describe our recent research in the diffusion of FOSS-type code reviews and a workflow that originated in the Linux Kernel. I'll also describe the results of surveys and interviews that we conducted with users of github (most of whom were professional developers working for private companies). Overall, our results indicate that development teams are adopting FOSS workflows in non-FOSS development organizations, that the success of github owes to FOSS development practices, and that github and git are being adopted by non-software developers.

About the speaker

Daniel M. German is associate professor of computer science at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research interests include open source legal compliance, open source software engineering, and software evolution. German has a PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo, Canada.