Calculating the Truck-Factor of Popular Open Source Projects

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 11, 2015 @01:14PM from the keeping-linus-safe-from-assassination dept.

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).

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Old news by Coryoth · 2015-07-11 13:34 · Score: 4, Informative

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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