Linux Credits File Reanimated

No_Weak_Heart writes "In his in depth paper Evolution of the Linux Credits file, Ilkka Tuomi discusses the challenges of extracting data from open source files, and then uses the extracted data to describe the geographical expansion of the core Linux developer community."

Comments

Research ??????

[Krapangor]

Sorry, but that's just parsing the credits file and doing some DNS lookups for the IP adresses. This might be considered a fun project on sourceforge but not serious research. You might ask now why I'm bitching about this. But that's really an important issue. Dead tree journals are getting more and more expensive and serious scientists are trying to biuld up a royality-free alternative. When self acclaimed "peer-reviewed" electronic journals like First Monday are publishing such human insterest stuff as "research" then they are harming the reputation of all electronic scientific journals and especially the projects to create a royalty-free peer-reviewed publication chain. And thus they are in fact harming science. Slashdot should in no way encourage such behavior.