Welcome to the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems It is quite an achievement to reach the five-year mark - that's the sign of a successful enterprise. This annual conference is now being recognized as the primary event for the open source research community, attracting not only high-quality papers, but also building a community around a technical program, a collection of workshops, and (starting this year) a Doctoral Consortium. Reaching this milestone reflects the efforts of many people, including the conference founders, as well as the organizers and participants in the...

Constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International IFIP WG 2.13 Conference on Open Source Systems, OSS 2012, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in September 2012.