Background: Open Source Software (OSS) started as an effort of communities of volunteers, but its practices have been adopted far beyond these initial scenarios. For instance, the strategic use of OSS in industry is constantly growing nowadays in different verticals, including energy, automotive, and health. For the public sector, however, the adoption has lagged behind even if benefits particularly salient in the public sector context such as improved interoperability, transparency, and digital sovereignty have been pointed out. When Public Sector Organisations (PSOs) seek to engage with OSS, this introduces challenges as they often lack the necessary technical capabilities, while also being bound and influenced by regulations and practices for public procurement. Aim: We aim to shed light on how public sector OSS projects, i.e., projects initiated, developed and governed by public sector organizations, are developed and structured. We conjecture, based on the challenges of PSOs, that the way development is organized in these type of projects to a large extent disalign with the commonly adopted bazaar model (popularized by Eric Raymond), which implies that development is carried out collaboratively in a larger community. Method: We plan to contrast public sector OSS projects with a set of earlier reported case studies of bazaar OSS projects, including Mockus et al.'s reporting of the Apache web server and Mozilla browser OSS projects, along with the replications performed on the FreeBSD, JBossAS, JOnAS, and Apache Geronimo OSS projects. To enable comparable results, we will replicate the methodology used by Mockus et al. on a purposefully sampled subset of public sector OSS projects. The subset will be identified and characterized quantitatively by mining relevant software repositories, and qualitatively investigated through interviews with individuals from involved organizations.

翻译：背景：开源软件（OSS）最初源于志愿者社区的努力，但其实践已远远超出初始场景。例如，开源软件在工业领域的战略应用如今持续增长，涵盖能源、汽车、医疗等不同垂直行业。然而，公共部门对开源软件的采纳相对滞后——尽管已有研究指出其在互操作性、透明度和数字主权等方面对公共部门尤为突出的潜在益处。当公共部门组织（PSOs）寻求参与开源软件时，会面临诸多挑战，因为它们往往缺乏必要的技术能力，同时受到公共采购法规和惯例的约束与影响。目标：我们旨在阐明公共部门开源软件项目（即由公共部门组织发起、开发和治理的项目）的开发方式与结构。基于PSOs面临的挑战，我们推测这类项目中的开发组织方式在很大程度上与广泛采用的集市模型（由Eric Raymond推广）不一致——该模型强调在更大社区内协作开展开发。方法：我们计划将公共部门OSS项目与一系列早期报告的集市型OSS项目案例进行对比，包括Mockus等人对Apache Web服务器和Mozilla浏览器OSS项目的研究报告，以及针对FreeBSD、JBossAS、JOnAS和Apache Geronimo OSS项目开展的重复验证研究。为获得可比结果，我们将复制Mockus等人的方法论，将其应用于经过有意抽样的公共部门OSS项目子集。该子集将通过挖掘相关软件仓库进行定量识别与特征描述，并通过与参与组织成员的访谈开展定性研究。