Situated Design and Universal Maintenance :

Attempts of sharing and reusing software tools are growing in today's ICT design world, and open sourcing software seem to become a good practice for this end. Although some people have reservation over the quality and usability of free/libre open source software (FLOSS), there are plenty lessons we can learn from the evolution of FLOSS. Here, we suggest a software evolution pattern named 'Situated Design, Universal Maintenance' (SDUM) based on our observation on the FLOSS development. It says that software has to be (re)situated for local user needs and maintained universally. Instead of treating often-criticised issues about the FLOSS development such as release criteria and programming for the self as nuances, we argue that these issues are normal in an open development environment, which can be adequately illustrated by the SDUM pattern. By nature of such an open development environment, these issues will be resolved over the development process if collaboration between developers and users distributed around the world is successful.