Open Source Developed by Individuals, Not Large Groups

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."

Comments

Re:Mode of 1 essentially meaningless

[elflord]

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, ..... )

Re:How does this rationalize "More Eyeballs"

[DevNull Ogre]

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.