Open source software as a scholarly contribution

This report addresses the subject of scholarship in open source software. The report presents an expanded model of scholarship due to Boyer and observes that the qualities of scholarship in Boyer’s model are exhibited in Open Source software projects. Thirty-two Open Source software projects were examined in the course of researching this report. Analysis of these projects suggests that Open Source software projects can be classified based on three types of contributions: infrastructure for a computing research community, tools for a research community outside computing and robust implementation of important, previously published algorithm. Three representative case studies, Player/Stage (robotics), the Image Processing Toolkit (image processing) and PSAT (numerical computation) are presented in detail in the report to illustrate the presence of attributes of scholarship and the three types of contribution.