arXiv subjects

Johan Linåker

Publications and source records attributed to Johan Linåker.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Public Sector Open Source Program Offices -- Archetypes for how to Grow (Common) Institutional Capabilities

Context: Open Source Software (OSS) is a crucial component of over 90\% of digital infrastructure underpinning industry and public digital services, facilitating collaborative software development and dissemination. Its significance in the European public sector has been emphasised through various Ministerial Declarations, highlighting its potential to accelerate digitalisation, transform businesses, and foster a digitally skilled population. Research Aim: This study aims to explore how the adoption, development, and collaboration on OSS can be enabled through organisational support functions or centres of competency, also known as Open Source Programme Offices (OSPOs) within Public Sector Organisations (PSOs) in the European Union, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland. Methodology: A qualitative research approach was adopted, involving an interview survey of 18 OSPO representatives across 16 cases of public-sector OSPOs. These cases were cross-analysed and categorised into six OSPO archetypes. The findings were validated and enriched through two follow-up focus groups that included earlier interviewees and additional experts. Results: The study identified six distinct OSPO archetypes, providing insights into their organisational structures, responsibilities, and contributions to OSS adoption. The archetypes, along with policy recommendations, offer guidance on how PSOs can design their own OSPOs, taking into account their specific context, resources, and policy goals. Conclusions: The findings enhance the understanding of OSPOs as strategic endeavours aimed at promoting OSS adoption. The study offers practical guidance for PSOs and policymakers on leveraging OSS to achieve strategic objectives, foster digital sovereignty, drive economic growth, and improve the interoperability and quality of digital services.

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arXiv2025

Advancing Digital Government: Integrating Open Source Software Enablement Indicators in Maturity Indexes

Context: Open Source Software (OSS) is a vital public good, included across most of modern software stacks, significantly impacting GDP and national tech growth, while supporting interoperability, sovereignty, and transparency. However, systematic measurement of governmental OSS adoption remain limited. Research Aim: This study contributes to digital government maturity indexes by analyzing policies and support actions leveraging OSS for software reuse and collaborative development across 16 digitally mature countries, and proposing potential indicators for said indexes. It examines OSS policy formation, stated goals, key actors, and support mechanisms. Methodology: A qualitative approach is used combining desk research of policy documents with semi-structured interviews of government representatives, producing detailed country reports. These are cross-analyzed, focusing on OSS policy promotion, rationale, and implementation support. Results: Policies facilitating OSS reuse are widespread, targeting both inbound acquisition and outbound sharing, and are predominantly governed by central public sector organizations. Policy goals include interoperability, digital sovereignty, transparency, and cost efficiency, with security framed both as a risk and strength. Implementation is supported by diverse Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) at multiple government levels, which foster capacity building, resource pooling, and sustainable project governance. Indicators are synthesized and proposed across 14 areas covering policy incentives and design, and implementation and support. Conclusions: OSS is a strategic enabler for public sector digital transformation. Clear policy frameworks, coupled with institutional support such as OSPOs, are essential. International digital maturity frameworks should expand OSS indicators to better guide and assess government adoption and impact.

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arXiv2025

A Cartography of Open Collaboration in Open Source AI: Mapping Practices, Motivations, and Governance in 14 Open Large Language Model Projects

The proliferation of open large language models (LLMs) is fostering a vibrant ecosystem in artificial intelligence (AI). However, the methods of collaboration used to develop open LLMs, both before and after their public release, have not yet been systematically studied, limiting our understanding of how open LLM projects are initiated, organised, and governed, as well as the opportunities to further foster this ecosystem. We address this gap through an exploratory analysis of open collaboration throughout the development and reuse lifecycle of open LLMs, drawing on semi-structured interviews with the developers of 14 diverse open LLM projects. These collaborations span multiple artefact domains -- including models, data, software, evaluation, compute, and community engagement -- each enabling distinct forms of participation and involving different stakeholders that evolves across the LLM development lifecycle, shifting from concentrated, selective engagement in the early stages to broader, distributed participation after model release. The open LLM developers are motivated by a variety of social, economic, and technological motivations, ranging from democratising access to AI and promoting open science to building regional ecosystems and expanding language representation. These dynamics are coordinated through a range of governance structures, typically formal and professionalised to varying degrees, including centralised company-led efforts to decentralised grassroots initiatives. We synthesise our findings in a conceptual model of open collaboration in open LLM ecosystems, provide recommendations for practice, and conclude that openness in open source AI is not a uniform property but an emergent outcome of how collaboration is organised across interconnected artefact domains, lifecycle stages, and institutional contexts.

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arXiv2025

Incubation and Beyond: A Comparative Analysis of ASF Projects Sustainability Impacts on Software Quality

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities' sustainability, meaning to remain operational without signs of weakening or interruptions to its development, is fundamental for the resilience and continuity of society's digital infrastructure. Many digital services and products either leverage or entirely rely on FOSS in their software stack. FOSS sustainability is a multifaceted concept, and the impact of its decline on community products is less known. In this study, we sought to understand how the different aspects of FOSS sustainability impact software quality from a life-cycle perspective. Specifically, we investigate whether and how support and incubation of FOSS projects or bypassing incubation correlate with software quality outcomes. We selected 342 FOSS projects from the Apache Software Foundation that have either graduated, retired, or bypassed their incubator program. We used 16 sustainability metrics to examine their impact on eight software quality metrics. Using Bayesian data analysis, we found that our selected sustainability metrics exhibit distinct relationships with software quality across different project trajectories. Graduated projects showed the strongest sustainability-software quality (SWQ) relationship, both during and post-incubation. In contrast, retired projects showed weaker relationships, despite receiving similar governance support. Bypassed projects, while not outperforming graduated ones, showed comparable sustainability-SWQ relationships. While structured incubation strengthens sustainability and SWQ in graduated projects, retired projects struggle to maintain strong sustainability-SWQ relationships, indicating that additional factors internal and specific to projects influence sustainability. This effect was evident among bypassed projects; their self-reliant sustainability practices yielded stronger sustainability-SWQ compared to the retired ones.

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arXiv2024

Pre-Release Experimentation in Indie Game Development: An Interview Survey

[Background] The game industry faces fierce competition and games are developed on short deadlines and tight budgets. Continuously testing and experimenting with new ideas and features is essential in validating and guiding development toward market viability and success. Such continuous experimentation (CE) requires user data, which is often limited in early development stages. This challenge is further exacerbated for independent (indie) game companies with limited resources. [Aim] We wanted to gain insights into CE practices in pre-release indie game development. [Method] We performed an exploratory interview survey with 10 indie game developers from different companies and synthesised findings through an iterative coding process. [Results] We present a CE framework for game development that highlights key parts to consider when planning and implementing an experiment and note that pre-release experimentation is centred on qualitative data. Time and resource constraints impose limits on the type and extent of experimentation and playtesting that indie companies can perform, e.g. due to limited access to participants, biases and representativeness of the target audience. [Conclusions] Our results outline challenges and practices for conducting experiments with limited user data in early stages of indie game development, and may be of value also for larger game companies, and for software intensive organisations in other industries.

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arXiv2024

Soft-lockins in Public Sector Acquisitions of Open Source Software-solutions: A Case Study on a Municipal E-Service Platform

Background: Open Source Software (OSS) is often seen as an option to mitigate risks of lock-ins. Yet, single-vendor OSS can still result in soft lock-ins due to knowledge asymmetries and technical barriers. Aim: This study explores actors that render such soft lock-ins. Research design: We conduct a qualitative case study of an E-service Platform (ESP) used by over 190+ municipalities. Results: User-driven lock-in factors emerged as a significant category, including limited and non-transparent communication, restrictive qualification requirements in procurement, confusion on maintainership, and comfort in the status quo. Technical lock-in factors include inadequate documentation, dependency management issues, and limited test coverage. Conclusions: Strong leadership and continuous training is needed to address presence of comfort and conservative culture among municipalities. Open Source Stewards, i.e., neutral hosts for OSS projects, can support municipalities in these tasks while also helping to foster an open, competitive collaboration that can enable a broader supplier ecosystem.

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arXiv2024

Sustaining Maintenance Labor for Healthy Open Source Software Projects through Human Infrastructure: A Maintainer Perspective

Background: Open Source Software (OSS) fuels our global digital infrastructure but is commonly maintained by small groups of people whose time and labor represent a depletable resource. For the OSS projects to stay sustainable, i.e., viable and maintained over time without interruption or weakening, maintenance labor requires an underlying infrastructure to be supported and secured. Aims: Using the construct of human infrastructure, our study aims to investigate how maintenance labor can be supported and secured to enable the creation and maintenance of sustainable OSS projects, viewed from the maintainers' perspective. Method: In our exploration, we interviewed ten maintainers from nine well-adopted OSS projects. We coded the data in two steps using investigator-triangulation. Results: We constructed a framework of infrastructure design that provide insight for OSS projects in the design of their human infrastructure. The framework specifically highlight the importance of human factors, e.g., securing a work-life balance and proactively managing social pressure, toxicity, and diversity. We also note both differences and overlaps in how the infrastructure needs to support and secure maintenance labor from maintainers and the wider OSS community, respectively. Funding is specifically highlighted as an important enabler for both types of resources. Conclusions: The study contributes to the qualitative understanding of the importance, sensitivity, and risk for depletion of the maintenance labor required to build and maintain healthy OSS projects. Human infrastructure is pivotal in ensuring that maintenance labor is sustainable, and by extension the OSS projects on which we all depend.

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arXiv2024

Free Open Source Communities Sustainability: Does It Make a Difference in Software Quality?

Context: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities' ability to stay viable and productive over time is pivotal for society as they maintain the building blocks that digital infrastructure, products, and services depend on. Sustainability may, however, be characterized from multiple aspects, and less is known how these aspects interplay and impact community outputs, and software quality specifically. Objective: This study, therefore, aims to empirically explore how the different aspects of FOSS sustainability impact software quality. Method: 16 sustainability metrics across four categories were sampled and applied to a set of 217 OSS projects sourced from the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program. The impact of a decline in the sustainability metrics was analyzed against eight software quality metrics using Bayesian data analysis, which incorporates probability distributions to represent the regression coefficients and intercepts. Results: Findings suggest that selected sustainability metrics do not significantly affect defect density or code coverage. However, a positive impact of community age was observed on specific code quality metrics, such as risk complexity, number of very large files, and code duplication percentage. Interestingly, findings show that even when communities are experiencing sustainability, certain code quality metrics are negatively impacted. Conclusion: Findings imply that code quality practices are not consistently linked to sustainability, and defect management and prevention may be prioritized over the former. Results suggest that growth, resulting in a more complex and large codebase, combined with a probable lack of understanding of code quality standards, may explain the degradation in certain aspects of code quality.

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arXiv2023

Open Source Software in the Public Sector: 25 years and still in its infancy

The proliferation of Open Source Software (OSS) adoption and collaboration has surged within industry, resulting in its ubiquitous presence in commercial offerings and shared digital infrastructure. However, in the public sector, both awareness and adoption of OSS is still in its infancy due to a number of obstacles including regulatory, cultural, and capacity-related challenges. This special issue is a call for action, highlighting the necessity for both research and practice to narrow the gap, selectively transfer and adapt existing knowledge, as well as generate new knowledge to enable the public sector to fully harness the potential benefits OSS has to offer.

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arXiv2023

Public Sector Open Source Software Projects -- How is development organized?

Background: Open Source Software (OSS) started as an effort of communities of volunteers, but its practices have been adopted far beyond these initial scenarios. For instance, the strategic use of OSS in industry is constantly growing nowadays in different verticals, including energy, automotive, and health. For the public sector, however, the adoption has lagged behind even if benefits particularly salient in the public sector context such as improved interoperability, transparency, and digital sovereignty have been pointed out. When Public Sector Organisations (PSOs) seek to engage with OSS, this introduces challenges as they often lack the necessary technical capabilities, while also being bound and influenced by regulations and practices for public procurement. Aim: We aim to shed light on how public sector OSS projects, i.e., projects initiated, developed and governed by public sector organizations, are developed and structured. We conjecture, based on the challenges of PSOs, that the way development is organized in these type of projects to a large extent disalign with the commonly adopted bazaar model (popularized by Eric Raymond), which implies that development is carried out collaboratively in a larger community. Method: We plan to contrast public sector OSS projects with a set of earlier reported case studies of bazaar OSS projects, including Mockus et al.'s reporting of the Apache web server and Mozilla browser OSS projects, along with the replications performed on the FreeBSD, JBossAS, JOnAS, and Apache Geronimo OSS projects. To enable comparable results, we will replicate the methodology used by Mockus et al. on a purposefully sampled subset of public sector OSS projects. The subset will be identified and characterized quantitatively by mining relevant software repositories, and qualitatively investigated through interviews with individuals from involved organizations.

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arXiv2022

Sustaining Open Data as a Digital Common -- Design principles for Common Pool Resources applied to Open Data Ecosystems

Motivation. Digital commons is an emerging phenomenon and of increasing importance, as we enter a digital society. Open data is one example that makes up a pivotal input and foundation for many of today's digital services and applications. Ensuring sustainable provisioning and maintenance of the data, therefore, becomes even more important. Aim. We aim to investigate how such provisioning and maintenance can be collaboratively performed in the community surrounding a common. Specifically, we look at Open Data Ecosystems (ODEs), a type of community of actors, openly sharing and evolving data on a technological platform. Method. We use Elinor Ostrom's design principles for Common Pool Resources as a lens to systematically analyze the governance of earlier reported cases of ODEs using a theory-oriented software engineering framework. Results. We find that, while natural commons must regulate consumption, digital commons such as open data maintained by an ODE must stimulate both use and data provisioning. Governance needs to enable such stimulus while also ensuring that the collective action can still be coordinated and managed within the frame of available maintenance resources of a community. Subtractability is, in this sense, a concern regarding the resources required to maintain the quality and value of the data, rather than the availability of data. Further, we derive empirically-based recommended practices for ODEs based on the design principles by Ostrom for how to design a governance structure in a way that enables a sustainable and collaborative provisioning and maintenance of the data. Conclusion. ODEs are expected to play a role in data provisioning which democratize the digital society and enables innovation from smaller commercial actors. Our empirically based guidelines intend to support this development.

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arXiv2022

How to characterize the health of an Open Source Software project? A snowball literature review of an emerging practice

Motivation: Society's dependence on Open Source Software (OSS) and the communities that maintain the OSS is ever-growing. So are the potential risks of, e.g., vulnerabilities being introduced in projects not actively maintained. By assessing an OSS project's capability to stay viable and maintained over time without interruption or weakening, i.e., the OSS health, users can consider the risk implied by using the OSS as is, and if necessary, decide whether to help improve the health or choose another option. However, such assessment is complex as OSS health covers a wide range of sub-topics, and existing support is limited. Aim: We aim to create an overview of characteristics that affect the health of an OSS project and enable the assessment thereof. Method: We conduct a snowball literature review based on a start set of 9 papers, and identify 146 relevant papers over two iterations of forward and backward snowballing. Health characteristics are elicited and coded using structured and axial coding into a framework structure. Results: The final framework consists of 104 health characteristics divided among 15 themes. Characteristics address the socio-technical spectrum of the community of actors maintaining the OSS project, the software and other deliverables being maintained, and the orchestration facilitating the maintenance. Characteristics are further divided based on the level of abstraction they address, i.e., the OSS project-level specifically, or the project's overarching ecosystem of related OSS projects. Conclusion: The framework provides an overview of the wide span of health characteristics that may need to be considered when evaluating OSS health and can serve as a foundation both for research and practice.

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arXiv2022

Collaboration in Open Government Data Ecosystems: Open Cross-sector Sharing and Co-development of Data and Software

Background: Open innovation highlights the potential benefits of external collaboration and knowledge-sharing, often exemplified through Open Source Software (OSS). The public sector has thus far mainly focused on the sharing of Open Government Data (OGD), often with a supply-driven approach with limited feedback-loops. We hypothesize that public sector organizations can extend the open innovation benefits by also creating platforms, where OGD, related OSS, and open standards are collaboratively developed and shared. Objective: The objective of this study is to explore how public sector organizations in the role of platform providers facilitate such collaboration in the form of OGD ecosystems and how the ecosystem's governance may be structured to support the collaboration. Method: We conduct an exploratory multiple-case study of two such ecosystems, focused on OGD related to the Swedish labor market and public transport sector, respectively. Data is gathered through interviews, document studies, and prolonged engagement at one of the platform providers. Results: The study presents governance structure and collaboration practices of the two ecosystems and discusses how these contribute to the platform providers' goals. The case studies highlight the need for platform providers to take an active and multi-functional role in enabling the sharing of data and software from and between the members of the ecosystem. Conclusions: We conclude that OGD ecosystems offer public sector organizations a possibility to catalyze the potential innovation output of OGD, but that it requires investment and adoption of an open and collaborative mindset.

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arXiv2022

A Survey on the Perception of Innovation in a Large Product-Focused Software Organization

Context. Innovation is promoted in companies to help them stay competitive. Four types of innovation are defined: product, process, business, and organizational. Objective. We want to understand the perception of the innovation concept in industry, and particularly how the innovation types relate to each other. Method. We launched a survey at a branch of a multi-national corporation. Results. From a qualitative analysis of the 229 responses, we see that the understanding of the innovation concept is somewhat narrow, and mostly related to product innovation. A majority of respondents indicate that product innovation triggers process, business, and organizational innovation, rather than vice versa. However, there is a complex interdependency between the types. We also identify challenges related to each of the types. Conclusion. Increasing awareness and knowledge of different types of innovation, may improve the innovation. Further, they cannot be handled one by one, but in their interdependent relations.

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arXiv2022

How Firms Adapt and Interact in Open Source Ecosystems: Analyzing Stakeholder Influence and Collaboration Patterns

[Context and motivation] Ecosystems developed as Open Source Software (OSS) are considered to be highly innovative and reactive to new market trends due to their openness and wide-ranging contributor base. Participation in OSS often implies opening up of the software development process and exposure towards new stakeholders. [Question/Problem] Firms considering to engage in such an environment should carefully consider potential opportunities and challenges upfront. The openness may lead to higher innovation potential but also to frictional losses for engaged firms. Further, as an ecosystem progresses, power structures and influence on feature selection may fluctuate accordingly. [Principal ideas/results] We analyze the Apache Hadoop ecosystem in a quantitative longitudinal case study to investigate changing stakeholder influence and collaboration patterns. Further, we investigate how its innovation and time-to-market evolve at the same time. [Contribution] Findings show collaborations between and influence shifting among rivaling and non-competing firms. Network analysis proves valuable on how an awareness of past, present and emerging stakeholders, in regards to power structure and collaborations may be created. Furthermore, the ecosystem's innovation and time-to-market show strong variations among the release history. Indications were also found that these characteristics are influenced by the way how stakeholders collaborate with each other.

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arXiv2022

A Contribution Management Framework for Firms Engaged in Open Source Software Ecosystems -- A Research Preview

Context and motivation: Contribution Management helps firms engaged in Open Source Software (OSS) ecosystems to motivate what they should contribute and when, but also what they should focus their resources on and to what extent. Such guidelines are also referred to as contribution strategies. The motivation for developing tailored contribution strategies is to maximize return on investment and sustain the influence needed in the ecosystem. Question/Problem: We aim to develop a framework to help firms understand their current situation and create a starting point to develop an effective contribution management process. Principal ideas/results: Through a design science approach, a prototype framework is created based on literature and validated iteratively with expert opinions through interviews. Contribution: In this research preview, we present our initial results after our first design cycle and consultation with one experienced OSS manager at a large OSS oriented software-intensive firm. The initial validation highlights importance of stakeholder identification and analysis, as well as the general need for contribution management and alignment with internal product planning. This encourages future work to develop the framework further using expert and case validation.

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arXiv2022

Open innovation using open source tools: a case study at Sony Mobile

Despite growing interest of Open Innovation (OI) in Software Engineering (SE), little is known about what triggers software organizations to adopt it and how this affects SE practices. OI can be realized in numerous of ways, including Open Source Software (OSS) involvement. Outcomes from OI are not restricted to product innovation but also include process innovation, e.g. improved SE practices and methods. This study explores the involvement of a software organization (Sony Mobile) in OSS communities from an OI perspective and what SE practices (requirements engineering and testing) have been adapted in relation to OI. It also highlights the innovative outcomes resulting from OI. An exploratory embedded case study investigates how Sony Mobile use and contribute to Jenkins and Gerrit; the two central OSS tools in their continuous integration tool chain. Quantitative analysis was performed on change log data from source code repositories in order to identify the top contributors and triangulated with the results from five semi-structured interviews to explore the nature of the commits. The findings of the case study include five major themes: i) The process of opening up towards the tool communities correlates in time with a general adoption of OSS in the organization. ii) Assets not seen as competitive advantage nor a source of revenue are made open to OSS communities, and gradually, the organization turns more open. iii) The requirements engineering process towards the community is informal and based on engagement. iv) The need for systematic and automated testing is still in its infancy, but the needs are identified. v) The innovation outcomes included free features and maintenance, and were believed to increase speed and quality in development. Adopting OI was a result of a paradigm shift of moving from Windows to Linux.

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arXiv2022

Editorial: Special Issue on Collaborative Aspects of Open Data in Software EngineeringJohan

High-quality data has become increasingly important to software engineers in designing and implementing today's software, for example, as an input to machine-learning algorithms and visualisation- and analytics-based features. Open data - i.e., data shared under a licence that gives users the right to study, process, and distribute the data to anyone and for any purpose - offers a mechanism to address this need. Data may originate from multiple sources, whether crowdsourced, shared by government agencies, or shared between commercial entities, and is undoubtedly inherent to all business and revenue models across the public sector, business and industry today. In this guest editorial for the Special Issue on Collaborative Aspects of Open Data in Software Engineering, we explore the collaborative aspects of open data in software engineering. We highlight how these aspects can benefit organisations, what challenges may exist and how these may be addressed based on current practice, and introduce the four papers included in this special issue.

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