I went on my pretty much annual summer cottage trip last week and during that week I managed to be relatively productive in terms of doing a bit of writing. More specifically, I did an English translation of my bachelor's thesis, which I originally wrote in Finnish throughout this spring.
Writing that thesis was a fun process and although I did have some issues finding relevant sources, I am quite proud of what I ended up writing. My thesis topic was open source project life cycle and survival, and it essentially talks about the stages an open source project goes through from the start of development until the end. It also covers what factors drive open source development and things that hinder it, along with what happens to open source projects when they get abandoned.
As someone who advocates for open source software, I felt that this was a topic that I wanted to cover, since I have been wondering about how reliable the open source foundations are. We occasionally hear horror stories about projects that many pieces of software depend on and then that project either gets deleted, abandoned or becomes incompatible and breaks many downstream projects, so I wanted to study how much abandonment takes place in open source projects and what reasons could be identified for project abandonment, and if it could be avoided.
I personally think my thesis was a success. As a bachelor's thesis it obviously doesn't do much original research and is mainly just a compilation of citations and my analysis based on those citations, but I think I did a pretty good job. I also received a 5/5 grade on my thesis, so highest possible grade, which did surprise me. I definitely did try my best but I wasn't quite sure how it measured up to other theses, but apparently it was pretty good.
If you want to read the translated thesis you can simply check out the PDF here. Just keep in mind that this is a bachelor's thesis done by a computer science student, translate to English in his spare time on a summer cottage.
If you want to hear more about my trip to the summer cottage, you can go and read about it on my Gemini log over at gemini://samsai.eu/. I have a few other posts that I've written on there as well.
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