Maintainability of FLOSS Projects

Ari Roponen

Some Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects have stood
time for a remarkable long time. Considering the well-known
Lehman's laws of software evolution there must have been a process
of adapting to the changing environment and at the same time
keeping the complexity down running all this time. By
familiarizing ourselves with this process we may find new tools,
techniques and traditions that help us lengthen the life cycle of
today's software products.

In this presentation we have the focus on the GNU Emacs, a
quarter-of-a-century years old text editor / programming
environment. Some factors behind its longevity will be discussed
and lessons learned from its development history will be
summarized.