Abstract
While researchers are becoming increasingly interested in studying OSS phenomenon, there is still a small number of studies analyzing larger samples of projects investigating the structure of activities among OSS developers. The significant amount of information that has been gathered in the publicly available open-source software repositories and mailing-list archives offers an opportunity to analyze projects structures and participant involvement. In this article, using on commits data from 263 Apache projects repositories (nearly all), we show that although OSS development is often described as collaborative, but it in fact predominantly relies on radically solitary input and individual, non-collaborative contributions. We also show, in the first published study of this magnitude, that the engagement of contributors is based on a power-law distribution.
Highlights
Open collaboration communities have been in the limelight of organization and information studies for the last decade [1]
Raymond [4], the traditional model can be compared to a medieval cathedral building with top-down management and hierarchy, while the open-collaboration model resembles a bazaar with an a-hierarchical structure without a coordinating center, which still is very successful
The only inconsistency we found was that the code collection by OpenHub was delayed compared to the data inside the project repositories
Summary
Open collaboration communities have been in the limelight of organization and information studies for the last decade [1]. Raymond [4], the traditional model can be compared to a medieval cathedral building with top-down management and hierarchy, while the open-collaboration model resembles a bazaar with an a-hierarchical structure without a coordinating center, which still is very successful. Even though not they are not physically present in the same place, software developers involved in Open Source Software (OSS) can create large-scale software [5].
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