Long-Term Analysis of the Development of the Open ACS Community Framework
Michael Aram, Stefan Koch, Gustaf Neumann · Advances in knowledge acquisition, transfer, and management book series/Advances in knowledge acquisition, transfer and management book series · 2016
The OpenACS community framework is a mature software toolkit for developing online community platforms. Originally invented at a university, it has prospered due to a high commercial demand and major investments, and subsequently settled as an open source project. In this chapter, the authors extend a previous analysis of the evolution of this software framework and its surrounding community. This long-term analysis of fourteen years of the project's evolution considers the commercial background of the members of the developer community (for-profit or non-profit), investigates the changing contribution and collaboration structures and the geographical distribution of the user community. The results reveal a continuous shift from new product development work by commercial developers to maintenance work by the open community and a relatively uniform and growing global distribution of users over the years.