Making a Difference: An Overview of Humanitarian Free Open Source Systems

Humanitarian Free Open Source Software (HFOSS) serves philanthropic goals that usually benefit non-profit organizations meant to improve the human condition. The altruistic goals these systems serve can offer developers additional motivation for contributing to OSS and have been seen as a way to attract more women to computing majors and to improve students' learning. We present an exploratory study of the currently existing HFOSS projects, aimed at giving an overview of their properties, including the most common application domains and the most popular programming languages used in this kind of systems. We also investigated the assumption that HFOSS systems attract more women developers and found the assumption to be incorrect.