Source Program Archives Site: a step toward cooperation of open-source movement and software engineering

The open-source movement plays an important role especially in the middle and lower phases of software development, and it brings a new research style to software engineering. Researchers can now access large quantities of large-scale and commercial-quality software for free without any non-disclosure agreement (NDA). In this paper, we report a project named "Sappy" in order to establish the communication field and a knowledge-sharing space for open-source software developers (where the knowledge consists of idioms, sample program segments, programming know-how, bug reports and debugging solutions, to-do lists, and so on). We have built the Source Program Archives Site, which collects and stores large quantities of excellent open-source software programs. The site analyses the source programs in order to generated marked-up source programs in HTML by the tool called SPIE which we are developing for this project. The site provides the tagged source programs through the Internet. Thus, software developers can browse and retrieve portions of software with popular Internet browsers like Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.