Grant for Studying Open Source

I've just got to get in on some of this grant stuff. You know, grants for projects like the $1,000,000 payout for a Virtual Reality Spray Paint Simulator System to Pine Technical College or the $2,000,000 for the Virginia Community College System web portal.

By these measures, the University of California-Davis's National Science Foundation grant for $750,000 to study how open source software is built seems almost reasonable. The researchers will focus on the Apache Web server, PostgreSQL database, and Python. Team members, led by Professor Premkumar Devanbu, will collect information from the message boards, bug reports, and e-mail discussions to understand how design teams organize themselves and interact.

According to the proposal, open source software defies conventional wisdom about collaborative projects. For example, most office workers know that the slowest member of the team sets the pace for everybody else. But in open source projects, work moves at the speed of the fastest member of the team, and adding more hands speeds things up rather than slowing them down, Devanbu said.

Devanbu and colleagues think that the way teams are organized will be reflected in the resulting software. At the same time, the structure of the software will itself have an effect on how teams of programmers are put together. For example, software that is broken into large chunks of code might need a different approach than a structure of smaller chunks.

This grant seems to be to Devanbu's "Open Source Immigration Modeling" project .

It might be worth mentioning that what is really being studied isn't "open source" per se, but "collaborative software development" which may or may not have anything to do with open source. But when you're filling out the forms to people who write the checks, "open source" has a better ring that "collaborative development" I suppose.

In any event, my real problem with this grant is that I didn't think of it first. Maybe next time.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:29 AM  Permalink