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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."
Starting with Eric Raymond's groundbreaking work, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work produced by a community of developers. Yet, given the nature of software programs, one also hears of developers with no lives that work very hard to achieve great product results. In this paper, I sought empirical evidence that would help us understand which is more common - the cave (i.e., lone producer) or the community. Based on a study of the top 100 mature products on Sourceforge, I find a few surprising things. First, 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 - numbers much lower than previous numbers reported for highly successful projects! Second, most OSS programs do not generate a lot of discussion. Third, products with more developers tend to be viewed and downloaded more often. Fourth, the number of developers associated with a project was positively correlated to the age of the project. Fifth, the larger the project, the smaller the percent of project administrators.
Starting with Eric Raymond's ground-breaking work, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work produced by a community of developers. Ghosh's cooking pot markets, similarly, point to a communal product development system. Certainly, this is a good label for some OSS products that have been featured prominently in the news. For instance, Moon and Sproull point out that by July 2000, about 350 contributors to LINUX were acknowledged in a credits list in the source code of the kernel.
However, my goal in this paper is to ask if the community-based model of product development holds as a general descriptor of the average OSS product. I systematically look at the actual number of developers involved in the production of one hundred mature OSS products. What I found is more consistent with the lone developer (or cave) model of production rather than a community model (with a few glaring exceptions, of course).
This is not to say that there is no community in the OSS movement. For instance, the findings of Butler, Kiesler, Sproull and Kraut (2002) point to participation by individuals other than the creators of OSS-program-related mailing lists. My contention is only that communities do things other than produce the actual product - e.g. provide feature suggestions, try products out as lead users, answer questions etc. Formally separating software production from other steps in the development of OSS programs will provide greater clarity to the discussion of the OSS phenomenon.
Should this not have an obvios tag...........oh wait wrong site. Sorry.
Where am I going and why am I in this handbasket?
However, the survey was made with the "top 100 mature" projects on SF, meaning that the lots of dead projects weren't considered at all.
Six sick