Open Source Under The Microscope

Okay looks like NSF has funded research to study the benefits of Open Source software development practices. Details of the research can be found at the UC Irvine Institute for Software Research. One nice quote from the original blog:

"The software-intensive systems in today's world have become so complex that we need every available design tool at our disposal," said Suzanne Iacono, NSF program director. "Open-source development has achieved some remarkable successes, and we need to learn from these successes as our systems become increasingly distributed, complex and heterogeneous. Traditional software engineering methods were originally developed for single-system design and development."

Interesting, it's the equivalent of National Geographic explorers studying animals in the wild. Get a bunch of Ph.D. with text-book training and see what they think about the wild world of open source development. This gets me thinking, should I submit my "How to evaluate an Open Source library" for academic review?

Kidding aside, this is actually pretty useful, it gives us a perspective that would otherwise be difficult to come by. Anyway, lot's of interesting publications available. I myself am trying to find the study on the Eclipse and NetBeans projects. Does anyone know where it is?