@mschuber

A Topological Analysis of the Open Source Software Development Community

, , , and . HICSS '05: Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 7, page 198. Washington, DC, USA, IEEE Computer Society, (2005)

Abstract

The fast growth of OSS has increased the interest in studying the composition of the OSS community and its collaboration mechanisms. Moreover, the success of a project may be related to the underlying social structure of the OSS development community. In this paper, we perform a quantitative analysis of Open Source Software developers by studying the entire development community at SourceForge 26. Statistics and social network properties are explored to find collaborations and the effects of different members in the OSS development community. Small world phenomenon and scale free behaviors are found in the SourceForge development network. These topological properties may potentially explain the success and efficiency of OSS development practices. We also infer from our analysis that weakly associated but contributing co-developers and active users may be an important factor in OSS development.

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presents a quantitive analysis of open source software developers

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