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Here is the first table Table 1: Top 10 authors ranked by contribution of code Author % of total free software foundation, inc 11.231 sun microsystems, inc 1.848 the regents of the university of california 1.359 gordon matzigkeit 1.216 paul houle 1.042 thomas g. lane 0.782 the massachusetts institute of technology 0.762 ulrich drepper 0.559 lyle johnson 0.528 peter miller 0.525

I looked at the algorithm used to determine how they collected the names of contributors. They grepped e-mail addresses, rcs ids, and copyright info from various files. I don't think that's the best way to draw any useful conclusions in regards to Open Source software. The only real conclusion found here is that Open Source projects include a lot of code written by other people. That's trivial. This study fails to make a distinction between an active contributor and someone whose code was simply borrowed. This is an important distinction to make! For instance, what if I were to take 1000 physics homework assignments and search for "F=ma" in them. I can't assume that the appearance of "F=ma" on your paper means that Newton helped you with your homework. I can only assume that you used Newton's second law of motion to help you solve the problem.

Similarly, if you wanted to determine who the most prolific scientific researcher is in a field, would you gather data by simply grepping for names in the texts of papers? No, you'll skew the data by counting the names who appear in the paper's "References" when you should just be counting the actual investigators who are listed as the authors of the paper!

I would like to see this study repeated but making the distinction between an active contributor to a project and someone whose code was simply included. Only then would a top-heavy distribution suggest anything meaningful in regards to OSS authorship.

If anyone has looked at the CODD algorithms/code and can show me if they used a more sophisicated method to filter out authors with no active involvement in a project, please post. It's a difficult problem to infer who actively and who passively contributed to a project with just a perl script.

check out the enlightenment stats

granted, good ole raster is a huge part of the project, but i was surprised to see him mentioned at least three times ("the rasterman", "carsten haitzler", and "raster@zip.com") as was mandrake...duno if this should be attributed to their data collection methods or to messy credits files (understandable in the case of raster's typing ;P)


-dk

We've just released the first free software survey of 25 million lines of code charting authors' contributions and project participation. naturally, the FSF is on top, with 11% of all code credited. that's not what we wanted to see, though - we wanted to see who wrote the code, not who owned it through copyright. whether the FSF should ask you to assign them the copyright or not, i think the FSF should most certainly list author credits. one thing people can "earn" from free software is reputation, and not listing authors' names takes that away.

We've just released the first free software survey of 25 million lines of code charting authors' contributions and project participation. naturally, the FSF is on top, with 11% of all code credited. that's not what we wanted to see, though - we wanted to see who wrote the code, not who owned it through copyright. whether the FSF should ask you to assign them the copyright or not, i think the FSF should most certainly list author credits. one thing people can "earn" from free software is reputation, and not listing authors' names takes that away.