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).

Comments

Could be worse

[thaneross]

You know what's significantly worse than an Open Source project with TF1? A closed source project with a TF1.

Re:morbid story is morbid

[Bert64]

It's actually less of a concern than it is with small vendor closed source...
There have been a few small software vendors where the company owner or core developer was killed, which then resulted not only in the ceasing of development, but also in the source code either being lost or tied up in legal disputes for years.

For something that's open and has user interest, it can be forked and development can be continued by someone else...