Cg 2010 M. Cameron Jones. Some Rights Reserved. This Work Is
c 2010 M. Cameron Jones. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. REMIX AND REUSE OF SOURCE CODE IN SOFTWARE PRODUCTION BY M. CAMERON JONES DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Library and Information Science in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor J. Stephen Downie, Chair Professor Michael B. Twidale, Director of Research Associate Professor Kyratso (Karrie) G. Karahalios Professor Linda C. Smith ABSTRACT The means of producing information and the infrastructure for disseminating it are constantly changing. The web mobilizes information in electronic formats, making it easier to copy, modify, remix, and redistribute. This has changed how information is produced, distributed, and used. People are not just consuming information; they are actively producing, remixing, and sharing information, using the web as a platform for creativity and production. This is true of software development as well. It is frequently commented by programmers and researchers who study software development, that programmers frequently copy and paste code. Although this practice is widely acknowledged, it is rarely studied directly, or explicitly accounted for in models of software development. However, this attitude is changing as software becomes more ubiquitous, and software development practice shifts away from the formal models of software engineering, towards a post-modernist perspective.
[Show full text]