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Calculating the Truck-Factor of Popular Open Source Projects
An anonymous reader writes: The Truck Factor describes the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated. Wikipedia defines it as a "measurement of the concentration of information in individual team members. A high truck factor means that many individuals know enough to carry on and the project could still succeed even in very adverse events." The term is also known by bus factor/number. In this article, the authors calculate the truck factor for 133 popular GitHub applications. Spoiler, but unsurprising: Linux ranks near the top (meaning that it's highly resilient).
Over 15 years ago Segfault.org reported their classic: "What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit By A Bus?" - An Empirical Study. If we learned anything from that, it's that we also have to watch out for muffins.
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Well, that's the beauty of distributed source control. Everyone who works on those projects has a complete repository of their own. The website provides a convenient synchronization point, but it's only authoritative by designation, not by any differences in the data. If there's a project on Git, and no one else has even bothered to keep a local copy of it somewhere, how much is really lost if GitHub goes away? If it's open source and no one else has even bothered to use the code anywhere else, again, how much are we losing? At that point, the project is already dead, and the general consensus is that it wasn't worth using anywhere. Not all code is really worth saving forever and ever. Hopefully GitHub is taking care to ensure that this doesn't happen, but active projects have no need to really worry.
So, I think the TF isn't really affected by the resiliency of the hosting site for distributed source control projects. The only thing it would do is potentially inconvenience developers for a time as they search for a new method/host to synchronize their development.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.