Abstract
With the development of open source community, through the interaction of developers, the collaborative development of software, and the sharing of software tools, the formation of open source software ecosystem has matured. Natural ecosystems provide ecological services on which human beings depend. Maintaining a healthy natural ecosystem is a necessity for the sustainable development of mankind. Similarly, maintaining a healthy ecosystem of open source software is also a prerequisite for the sustainable development of open source communities, such as GitHub. This paper takes GitHub as an example to analyze the health condition of open source ecosystem and, also, it is a research area in Symmetry. Firstly, the paper presents the healthy definition of GitHub open source ecosystem health and, then, according to the main components of natural ecosystem health, the paper proposes the health indicators and health indicators evaluation method. Based on the above, the GitHub ecosystem health prediction method is proposed. By analyzing the projects and data collected in GitHub, it is found that, using the proposed evaluation indicators and method, we can analyze the healthy development trend of the GitHub ecosystem and contribute to the stability of ecosystem development.
Highlights
Software development has gradually evolved into an open software development form from the previously closed software production line with company organization, and the prosperity of the open source community expedites the process
Taking GitHub as an example, the study focuses on the health of open source software ecosystem by analyzing the activities and behaviors of developers and users, in order to provide a theoretical basis for the comprehensive understanding, evaluation, and management of the ecosystem
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 is related work, which introduces the health research of ecosystem and software ecosystem; Section 3 presents the GitHub ecosystem health indicators and prediction model; Section 4 is the experiments design and result analysis; Section 5 is the analysis of the validation of predication model; and the final chapter draws conclusions and presents possible future research orientations
Summary
Software development has gradually evolved into an open software development form from the previously closed software production line with company organization, and the prosperity of the open source community expedites the process. Distributed development method and cooperated innovation have steadily become the mainstream [1]. Faced with this situation, researchers treat software production as a new concept, and this way of production is referred to as the software ecosystem. GitHub, an open source software ecosystem, is a hosted platform for Git’s distributed version management control system for open source and proprietary software projects, and has become the preferred method of managing software development and discovering existing code. Taking GitHub as an example, the study focuses on the health of open source software ecosystem by analyzing the activities and behaviors of developers and users, in order to provide a theoretical basis for the comprehensive understanding, evaluation, and management of the ecosystem. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 is related work, which introduces the health research of ecosystem and software ecosystem; Section 3 presents the GitHub ecosystem health indicators and prediction model; Section 4 is the experiments design and result analysis; Section 5 is the analysis of the validation of predication model; and the final chapter draws conclusions and presents possible future research orientations
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