In an effort to encourage research on understanding and improving FOSS (Free, Open Source Software), MSR has established the “FOSS Impact paper” award. The award will be granted to papers that show outstanding contributions to the FOSS community. For many years, the MSR community has leveraged public data from FOSS projects, and in the process, the community has contributed new insights, tools, and techniques to assist FOSS projects in different ways. This award recognizes and encourages this line of research. Authors can self-nominate their research papers for the FOSS award, after which the dedicated committee will evaluate these papers.

How to self-nominate for the FOSS Award

Any paper that is notified as accepted in the MSR Technical Track (including all categories: Research Papers, Practice Experience, and Tool Track) can self-nominate for the FOSS Award. Those papers will be examined by the FOSS Award Committee, that will select awarded papers based on the impact of the paper (or the study, experience or tool described in it) on the FOSS (free, open source software) development community. To self-nominate, authors will submit their paper (the same version that was reviewed but with no double-blind provisions) to the FOSS Award track in EasyChair. When convenient, links to source code, reproducible packages, etc. related to the paper should appear in the paper, so that the FOSS Award Committee can inspect them. When submitting their paper, authors will be requested to fill in a form, where they will explain the rationale for self-nominating the paper. This rationale should be written in terms of the impact of the paper on the FOSS development community: how it could benefit, or are already benefiting, from its results, the use of the tools described, the reported experience, etc.

Announcement of the awarded papers

The awarded papers will be announced during MSR. They could be one or more papers, but the Award could also be declared void.

James Walden: The Impact of a Major Security Event on an Open Source Project: The Case of OpenSSL

Award for its analysis on the impact of the Heartbleed vulnerability on the OpenSSL project, providing recommendations for how open source projects can adapt and improve. The author provides guidance regarding metrics that helps to assess the health of a project. This paper is a piece of literature that interesting and relevant to many FOSS maintainers.