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  1. null (Ed.)
  2. Evidence shows that developer reputation is extremely important when accepting pull requests or resolving reported issues. It is particularly salient in Free/Libre Open Source Software since the developers are distributed around the world, do not work for the same organization and, in most cases, never meet face to face. The existing solutions to expose developer reputation tend to be forge specific (GitHub), focus on activity instead of impact, do not leverage social or technical networks, and do not correct often misspelled developer identities. We aim to remedy this by amalgamating data from all public Git repositories, measuring the impact of developer work, expose developer's collaborators, and correct notoriously problematic developer identity data. We leverage World of Code (WoC), a collection of an almost complete (and continuously updated) set of Git repositories by first allowing developers to select which of the 34 million(M) Git commit author IDs belong to them and then generating their profiles by treating the selected collection of IDs as that single developer. As a side-effect, these selections serve as a training set for a supervised learning algorithm that merges multiple identity strings belonging to a single individual. As we evaluate the tool and the proposed impact measure, we expect to build on these findings to develop reputation badges that could be associated with pull requests and commits so developers could easier trust and prioritize them. 
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  3. Open source software (OSS) is essential for modern society and, while substantial research has been done on individual (typically central) projects, only a limited understanding of the periphery of the entire OSS ecosystem exists. For example, how are tens of millions of projects in the periphery interconnected through technical dependencies, code sharing, or knowledge flows? To answer such questions we a) create a very large and frequently updated collection of version control data for FLOSS projects named World of Code (WoC) and b) provide basic tools for conducting research that depends on measuring interdependencies among all FLOSS projects. Our current WoC implementation is capable of being updated on a monthly basis and contains over 12B git objects. To evaluate its research potential and to create vignettes for its usage, we employ WoC in conducting several research tasks. In particular, we find that it is capable of supporting trend evaluation, ecosystem measurement, and the determination of package usage. We expect WoC to spur investigation into global properties of OSS development leading to increased resiliency of the entire OSS ecosystem. Our infrastructure facilitates the discovery of key technical dependencies, code flow, and social networks that provide the basis to determine the structure and evolution of the relationships that drive FLOSS activities and innovation. 
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  4. FLOSS ecosystem as a whole is a critical component of world’s computing infrastructure, yet not well understood. In order to understand it well, we need to measure it first. We, therefore, aim to provide a framework for measuring key aspects of the entire FLOSS ecosystem. We first consider the FLOSS ecosystem through lens of a supply chain. The concept of supply chain is the existence of series of interconnected parties/affiliates each contributing unique elements and expertise so as to ensure a final solution is accessible to all interested parties. This perspective has been extremely successful in helping allowing companies to cope with multifaceted risks caused by the distributed decision-making in their supply chains, especially as they have become more global. Software ecosystems, similarly, represent distributed decisions in supply chains of code and author contributions, suggesting that relationships among projects, developers, and source code have to be measured. We then describe a massive measurement infrastructure involving discovery, extraction, cleaning, correction, and augmentation of publicly available open-source data from version control systems and other sources. We then illustrate how the key relationships among the nodes representing developers, projects, changes, and files can be accurately measured, how to handle absence of measures for user base in version control data, and, finally, illustrate how such measurement infrastructure can be used to increase knowledge resilience in FLOSS. 
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  5. Motivation: Software engineering for High Performace Computing (HPC) environments in general [1] and for big data in particular [5] faces a set of unique challenges including high complexity of middleware and of computing environments. Tools that make it easier for scientists to utilize HPC are, therefore, of paramount importance. We provide an experience report of using one of such highly effective middleware pbdR [9] that allow the scientist to use R programming language without, at least nominally, having to master many layers of HPC infrastructure, such as OpenMPI [4] and ScalaPACK [2]. Objective: to evaluate the extent to which middleware helps improve scientist productivity, we use pbdR to solve a real problem that we, as scientists, are investigating. Our big data comes from the commits on GitHub and other project hosting sites and we are trying to cluster developers based on the text of these commit messages. Context: We need to be able to identify developer for every commit and to identify commits for a single developer. Developer identifiers in the commits, such as login, email, and name are often spelled in multiple ways since that information may come from different version control systems (Git, Mercurial, SVN, ...) and may depend on which computer is used (what is specified in .git/config of the home folder). Method: We train Doc2Vec [7] model where existing credentials are used as a document identifier and then use the resulting 200-dimensional vectors for the 2.3M identifiers to cluster these identifiers so that each cluster represents a specific individual. The distance matrix occupies 32TB and, therefore, is a good target for HPC in general and pbdR in particular. pbdR allows data to be distributed over computing nodes and even has implemented K-means and mixture-model clustering techniques in the package pmclust. Results: We used strategic prototyping [3] to evaluate the capabilities of pbdR and discovered that a) the use of middleware required extensive understanding of its inner workings thus negating many of the expected benefits; b) the implemented algorithms were not suitable for the particular combination of n, p, and k (sample size, data dimension, and the number of clusters); c) the development environment based on batch jobs increases development time substantially. Conclusions: In addition to finding from Basili et al., we find that the quality of the implementation of HPC infrastructure and its development environment has a tremendous effect on development productivity. 
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