Peer to peer support for the reuse of Open Source Software libraries

A large number of high quality open source software (OSS) reuse libraries has been developed, and has been becoming increasingly adopted by many software development organizations. Programmers who reuse such OSS libraries often rely on the online peer support platforms such as dedicated mailing lists to seek help from other programmers. However, there is little research in understanding and evaluating how effective such online peer support platforms are for OSS reuse libraries. By detailed studies of mailing lists of two popular OSS libraries (Lucene-Java and Apache Commons), this paper attempts to understand the effectiveness of mailing list-based peer support system. The results indicate that mailing lists are very responsive to the needs of reusing programmers, and this responsiveness is largely fueled by the strong involvement of library developers.