Using antipatterns to improve the quality of FLOSS development

Antipatterns have been mostly reported in closed source sof tware environments. With the advent of Free/Libre Open Source Softw are (FLOSS), researchers have started analysing popular FLOSS projects, s eeking vitality indicators and success patterns. However, an impressively high pe rcentage of FLOSS projects are unsuccessful. Moreover, even in the successfu l cases of FLOSS there can be found tracks of failed attempts, dead-ends, forks, ab andonments etc. FLOSS antipatterns can help developers to improve their code and i mprove the communication and collaboration within the FLOSS community. In thi s paper, we present some example of FLOSS antipatterns and discuss the benefits t hat they bring to various FLOSS user roles. Furthermore, we present ontology-ba sed technology and software tools that can be used to assist FLOSS developers an d community users to identify, document, share antipatterns and use these mecha nisms to assist FLOSS projects conform to specified requirements. Finally, we pro pose a framework for the quantitative identification of the antipatterns to use a quality indicators in the certification of FLOSS products.