Trends in an Open Source Project

Doug Muth writes "On Eric Raymond's website, he has just put a graph depicting the growth of Fetchmail over the last few years. It's rather interesting that the number of participants in the project has only grown linearly - not what one would expect from an open source project. Anyone have ideas as to why this less than expected growth might be?"

Comments

Try doing this for the Linux kernel and Mozilla

[mce]

Someone with a lot of time on his or her hands (or even better: who gets payed for doing it) should try making similar graphs for the Linux kernel and Mozilla. That would yield a few interesting comparisons.

The obvious problem is that it would be a bit hard to do (and even a bit harder to "prove correct"), but still... One thing one might consider is to look at all the Linux kernel or Mozilla releases and scan them for e-mail addresses and the like. Maybe only looking at the CREDITS files, maybe also scanning the source itself (e.g. to find driver co-authors that never made it into CREDITS and also those that are explicitly thanked by driver authors for contributing bug reports and fixes). Unfortunately, to make the results interesting, one would also be able to compare those numbers with those of the related "user" mailing lists and collecting that kind of data will be near impossible, I fear. In any case, one would have to be very careful in collecting and even more in interpreting, though.

It probably won't be done, but I would not at all be surprised to find developer curves very similar to the fetchmail one. The curves for the number of users may look very different, but my guess is that the developer one would not.

--

It's quite simple

[konstant]

They're spectators. IOW, they're subscribed because they want news about Fetchmail, or because they're enamoured with ESR. They aren't coding.

Look at the coding curve. It's logarithmic, and approaching a constant of about 17,000. That means that the additional participants just aren't producing proportionate changes in the open source project.

ESR has graphed how the popularity of his fetchmail project has grown over time, which could very reasonably be linear for such a specialized application. He has not graphed how an open source effort grows. A more suitable graph would indicate number of contributors rather than constituents of the mailing lists.

-konstant

Why would one expect it to be linear or more?

[Morgaine]

I see no reason why it should be linear nor greater than linear, but plenty of reasons why it should be less than linear or possibly logarithmic.

After all, as projects near a state of completion, you'd expect fewer and fewer bug fixes and enhancements from developers both old and new. If there is any pressure for change resulting from an increase in a project's overall audience, it's certainly not very much, just a secondary effect.

What makes you think the opposite?

more graphs

[joey]

Here's another set of graphs tracking a free software project -- I've been tracking the number of packages in Debian, as well as how many packages are built with different tools, especially my debhelper tool that most debian packages build with these days.

I'm also seeing linear growth, though the angle is steeper.

The Limits To Growth - think ecologically

[Seth Finkelstein]

It's very simple if you think in terms of ecological niches. No project can grow exponentially for an unlimted amount of time, otherwise it would soon overflow its environment. Thus, such exponential growth must cease at some point.

Some project have larger "habitats" - the excitement of Linux is that it's been able to jump from a niche of hobbyists to business applications and even some lower-level users. It has expanded its environment, thus has room for more rounds of exponential growth. The Internet itself saw this phenomenon when it jumped from only technical/professional users to ordinary people.

A specialized mail application does not have this potential (unless it somehow manages to become indispensable, a "killer app").

Thus exponential growth ceases fairly quickly for it.

- Seth Finkelstein

You need to look at a group of projects, not one.

[Bruce Perens]

I surmise that exponential expansion can only be seen when you consider a large group of projects that are roughly the offspring of one project. The first successful projects inspire other related projects, which form their own teams, which inspire more related projects, and there would be your exponential growth. So, you might consider Apache and several other web servers as children of the NCSA server, and Zope, PHP, etc., as a child of Apache, etc. The relationships will be very rough, don't flame me because you don't think PHP is an offspring of Apache.

So, you might want to look at a few different trees, with root nodes like the formation of the GNU project, Linux, the Berkeley System Distribution, and the NCSA Web Server Project. I suspect you can make a case for exponential expansion that way.

Thanks

Bruce Perens

but the number of programers is growing!

[Giraffit]

Wouldn't you expect the number of competent programmers will grow as the open source movment grows? Consider those points:

1. reading good source is necessary to learn programming - now more good source is avaliable.

2. the concept of playing with code is now open to people who might just not think of it before. (Scientists with programing skills can develop programs that were purchased before)

3. programming toold are cheaper and better than ever. now its getting easier to code.

Tchoh!

[Colm@TCD]

In his script, Eric has:
# We don't deal with leap years here because the baseline day is after
# the last leap year (1996) and there's a long time before the next
# one (2004).

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear...