Studying Open Source Versioning Metadata

The SourceForge Research Data Archive (SRDA) is a collection of Open Source Software (OSS) data and resources. Over 200 researchers worldwide use the archive for research in many fields. SourceForge provides us with monthly data dumps mirroring their back-end database, but their versioning metadata is not provided. OSS projects have used versioning programs such as Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) for many decades. Publicly available versioning logs offer a development trail ripe for individual and comparative studies. We describe the downloading and warehousing of such data from SourceForge, BerliOS, and GNU Savannah and the interface and resources we offer for browsing and studying the data. We also present some preliminary data analysis and outline some interesting possibilities for future research that this data provides. This thesis focuses on OSS versioning metadata as well as the recent developments of SRDA.