Leaving Behind the Software History When Transitioning to Open-Source: Reasons and Implications - Speaker Deck

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Leaving Behind the Software History When Transitioning to Open-Source: Reasons and Implications @gustavopinto @igorsteinmacher @gerosa_marco

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The project deleted the software history and imported the source code all at once!

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Mihai Codoban, Sruti Srinivasa Ragavan, Danny Dig, and Brian Bailey. Software history under the lens: A study on why and how developers examine it. In ICSME 2015, pages 1–10, 2015. “Software history is indispensable for developers. Of the 217 developers surveyed in this work, 85% ﬁnd software history important to their development activities and 61% need to refer to history at least several times a day.” More beneﬁts: Knowledge acquisition (Pham et al., 2013) End-users take advantage of the software history (Kuttal et al., 2014) Research (co-changes, defect prediction, mining, etc.)

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Why one would remove the whole history? What are the reasons? and the implications?

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source and deleted the history We could ﬁnd only 8 projects that kept the history

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source 1. Why did you decide not to keep the software history?

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source 2. Do the core developers face any kind of problems with the lack of software history?

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source 3. Do the newcomers face any kind of problems with the lack of software history?

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source 4. How does the lack of software history impacted software evolution?

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source 15 did not answered our inquiries 41 answers in total

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source 15 did not answered our inquiries

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source 15 did not answered our inquiries

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source 15 did not answered our inquiries

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source 15 did not answered our inquiries

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We found 50 proprietary projects that made the shift to open source 15 did not answered our inquiries

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RQ1. Why some projects do not open the software history? Extracting just the subfolder would have been difﬁcult, and older versions would not have built First get something working, and then disentangle it from your own proprietary code, conﬁguration, etc. Entangled with proprietary code Contains sensitive information Housekeeping needed License and legal reasons

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RQ1. Why some projects do not open the software history? The earliest commits may contain information we cannot share, so upon releasing we squashed the history Going through thousands of commits means no one will take on the heroic task of even open- sourcing the product Entangled with proprietary code Contains sensitive information Housekeeping needed License and legal reasons

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RQ1. Why some projects do not open the software history? We cleaned embarrassing or inappropriate comments, brought the code up to OSS standards … Entangled with proprietary code Contains sensitive information Housekeeping needed License and legal reasons

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RQ1. Why some projects do not open the software history? Made it much easier to get the lawyers at our parent company to agree to open source it Instead of reviewing the entire history, they could review just the current state Entangled with proprietary code Contains sensitive information Housekeeping needed License and legal reasons

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RQ2. What are the challenges to deal with a history free project? None of the core developers has wanted or needed to go look back through the history Communication, documentation, and idiomatic expressions of the Python code are sufﬁcient to maintain project coherency

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RQ2. What are the challenges to deal with a history free project? We still use the non-git system internally and can refer to history if we need to I’m probably the person most likely to access it, and I’d estimate that I use it only a few times per year

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RQ2. What are the challenges to deal with a history free project? For a fast-moving project, history from more than half a year ago is not particularly valuable for development I am not aware of any problems for newcomers The lack of software history does not greatly impact software evolution and understanding

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Open challenges How to design tools to leverage and visualize the software history? How to improve tools to migrate code between repositories and to disentangle source code How to ﬁnd sensitive information in the software history? How to estimate the cost of releasing the history? When do developers need to understand the software history?

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Leaving Behind the Software History When Transitioning to Open-Source: Reasons and Implications @gustavopinto @igorsteinmacher @gerosa_marco