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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."

4 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. first post by hummassa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think the problem with the study is the use of SourceForge as the source :) for the data.

    no pun intended?

    FP, anyway...?

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  2. ...but... by FortKnox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How many projects were BASED on other open source projects?

    Isn't that more of the point?

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  3. Re:Not Surprising by John+Hasler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "I can see where a large OSS project could get unwieldy really quickly with 100's of hobby developers scattered across the globe. As the number of "free" developers involved goes up, I'm sure the number of problems skyrockets."

    I guess that's why Debian is a total failure.

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  4. Re:And isn't it amazing... by Mr_Silver · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ...that the OSS always seems to turn out better than commercial software?

    (emphasis mine)

    Always? Why is it that when everyone says this they can only quote about 3 or 4 projects?

    Just because Apache is better than IIS doesn't mean that every commercial product is inferior to the OSS version.

    Please don't delude yourself. The majority of the time commercial stuff is better than OSS because they have the time and resources to get people working on it.

    I still find OpenOffice poorer than MS Office, GIMP poorer than Photoshop and so on.

    Yes there are exceptions (such as Apache) but generally OSS is of a slightly poorer quality than commercial - but more than makes up for it by the fact that it's free and doesn't come with restrictive licencing agreements.

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