Maintenance Support in Open Source Software Projects
This research addresses maintenance challenges for open source software users and developers, but it is incremental as it empirically validates existing perceptions about support channels.
The study investigated the relationship between maintenance issues and support channels in open source software, finding that forums and mailing lists significantly address user requests, while trackers are effective for error reporting and user requests based on a dataset of 120 projects.
Easy and mostly free access to the internet has resulted in the growing use of open source software (OSS). However, it is a common perception that closed proprietary software is still superior in areas such as software maintenance and management. The research model of this study establishes a relationship between maintenance issues (such as user requests and error handling) and support provided by open source software through project forums, mailing lists and trackers. To conduct this research, we have used a dataset consisting of 120 open source software projects, covering a wide range of categories. The results of the study show that project forums and mailing lists play a significant role in addressing user requests in open source software. However according to the empirical investigation, it has been explored that trackers are used as an effective medium for error reporting as well as user requests.