Abstract

The evolution of the Unix operating system is made available as a

version-control repository, covering the period from its inception in

1972 as a five thousand line kernel, to 2015 as a widely-used 26

million line system. The repository contains 659 thousand commits and 2306 merges.

The repository employs the commonly used Git system for its storage,

and is hosted on the popular GitHub archive. It has been created by

synthesizing with custom software 24 snapshots of systems developed at

Bell Labs, Berkeley University, and the 386BSD team, two legacy

repositories, and the modern repository of the open source FreeBSD

system. In total, 850 individual contributors are identified, the

early ones through primary research. The data set can be used for

empirical research in software engineering, information systems, and software archaeology.

Biography:

Diomidis Spinellis is a Professor in the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece.  His research interests include software engineering, IT security, and  programming languages.  He has written two award-winning, widely-translated books: “Code Reading” and “Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective”.  Dr. Spinellis has also published more than 200 technical papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings, which have received more than 2000 citations.  He served for a decade as a member of the IEEE Software editorial board, authoring the regular “Tools of the Trade” column.  He has contributed code that ships with Mac OS X and BSD Unix and is the developer of UMLGraph and other open-source software packages, libraries, and tools.  He holds an MEng in Software Engineering and a PhD in Computer Science, both from Imperial College London.  Dr. Spinellis is as an elected member of the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors (2013–2015), and a senior member of the ACM and the IEEE. From January 2015 he is serving as the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Software.