Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Open Source Developed by Individuals, Not Large Groups

Posted by timothy on from the startling-conclusions dept.

AlainRoy writes "A new article was just published in First Monday, which suggests that most open source projects have rather few developers." He excerpts from the study, done by Sandeep Krishnamurthy: "Based on a study of the top 100 mature products on Sourceforge...most OSS programs are developed by individuals, rather than communities. The median number of developers in the 100 projects I looked at was 4 and the mode was 1."

6 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Mode of 1 essentially meaningless by Niban · · Score: 3, Informative

    the mode is merely the most common result, which just accounts for all the personal projects that are placed on ourgeforge and go nowhere for various reasons.

    A truer survery would take into account codebase size vs. contributers or some other measure. (Which I believe occured some time back, with similar results to this one, the majority of work was done by a small group of individuals)

    1. Re:Mode of 1 essentially meaningless by elflord · · Score: 4, Informative
      he mode is merely the most common result, which just accounts for all the personal projects that are placed on ourgeforge and go nowhere for various reasons.

      Except he selected the 100 "top mature" projects. So it was a select group of projects. I suppose it depends on what "top 100 mature projects" actually means. Though I suspect the largest projects aren't on that sucky sourcefourge site, since they usually have the resources to find another host.

      What I would have liked to see is a carefully chosen selection of opensource projects. (XFree86, vim, kernel, koffice, ..... )

  2. Bah. by cjpez · · Score: 3, Informative

    If he's only using Sourceforge as the primary data source, then things are obviously going to be skewed. How many times have you contributed to an Open-Source project by emailing a patch to a mailing list or an author? Let me guess how often that shows up on sourceforge. It's like Freshmeat's "Vitality Rating." Unless you do ALL of your project management stuff via Freshmeat, it considers you basically a dead project.

    --
    Al Qaeda has ninjas!
  3. Re:How does this rationalize "More Eyeballs" by DevNull+Ogre · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mockus and Herbsleb (PDF, from the 2nd Workshop on OSS Engineering) look at the way Apache is developed (and try to glean lessons that can be applied to distributed development in general). They point out that a small team of core developers produce most of the new features, a much larger group contributes patches to fix bugs, and a much larger group than that uses and tests the code. In my experience, that is how the most successful OSS projects work.

    The study in this article only counts the number of registered developers--the small core team. The people contributing patches are where the "More Eyeballs" argument comes in. I don't think that was reflected in this study.

  4. # of Developers not so important by Lucas+Membrane · · Score: 3, Informative
    It's the number of users, counting testers, that matters. Feedback is the main thing. Most bugs can be located quickly, if their existence is realized. The shops that do high quality either spend considerable time on reviews or considerable time on testing (like 3 testers per developer). Unfortunately, there are about 300 people who want to be a developer for everyone who wants to be a tester.

    Open source can get many users emailing in bug reports if it is easy to do so (please don't make me subscribe to an email list to send in a bug report). The interesting statistic that I'd like to see is the percentage of open source projects that are in beta. It seems like the 'good' version of open source projects, ie the one with the 'must have' features, is almost never done, but often in alpha or beta, and I can be a tester for free. I like to do that, but I can't afford to do it for every piece of software that I use, sorry.

  5. Why would it be otherwise ? by redelm · · Score: 3, Informative
    Doh! Who's surprised by this finding? I'm a small open source developer [cpuburn], and I imagine that most open source is written by induhviduals who have real problems they have to solve as part of the job, school or hobby. One person. So they write a pgm to solve it. Then publish it as open source because doing so is cheap, easy and "The Right Thing" to do. Open-source is not written infor-profit software project houses made [in]famous by Microsoft. UNIX and other Linux-like OSes encourage small pgms because many small pgms can be built up into large functionality very easily [at least on the CLI].

    From a project management perspective, small is much better because there are fewer interprosonal interfaces and less communication time needed. Heirarchical layering is only partically effective at reducing communications overhead. Architectural isolation works better. On my own project, most of the open source input has been commentary on programs or bugs, plus one big orthogonal contribution [MS-Win32 GUI]. This works. Different people hacking on different parts of the same pgm wouldn't.

    Where open-source gets weak is large GUI projects like office suites. Here, more people seem required, and it's a bit harder to assemble and manage a team of people who all have developing GUI office apps as a goal. Plus there's alot of communication overhead. The best that could be done would be via architectural compartimentalization, or better yet, if a series of tools analogous to the CLI pipeline/script could be made for the GUI world.