Statistics On Free Software projects

GenericBoy writes: "The first edition of The Orbiten Free Software Survey is out online. Some of the stats are number of authors and projects, the top 10 contributing authors, how many MB are in all of the free software projects put together (!) and a bunch more. " Now, as they themselves point out in the their Scope and Method, the methodology is crude, and I don't think Orbiten could quite submit it to Nature yet or anything, but it's an interesting bunch of stats.

Comments

Discussion on Advogato

[Carl]

This was already discussed on Advogato yesterday.

The discussion points out some interesting facts about why some individuals are listed as big contributers (such as the author of libtool. Duh.) and why some aren't listed at all. They even have some comments from the developers of the survey.

And I just love the comment of Havoc Pennington:

It shows me as a major contributor to "gnuclear" and nothing else - I don't even know what gnuclear is. ;-)

Key contributors

[konstant]

What I find most interesting by far is the composition of the contributions when viewed by project. In nearly every project I viewed, there are two or three elite "key contributors" who provide somthing on the order of 1/3 to 7/10 or more of the code, with the remainder provided in a slew of sub-1% coders.

This relates an interesting story. It appears that, while the real strength of OSS is incremental improvement over time, few projects can exist without a guiding intellect or a handful of ambitious coders on the core team.

Presenting this data to employers who are concerned about losing control of their code may help assuage their fears of open source. Clearly projects that are "owned" by no one are rarities. A corporation *can* have its cake and eat it too.

-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!