What Is Needed for the Sustainable Success of OSS Projects: Efficiency Analysis of Commit Production Process via Git

Changhee Kim,Jaeyoon Song

doi:10.3390/su10093001

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relative efficiency of open source software projects, and to analyze what is needed for their sustainable success. The success of open source software is known to be attributable to a massive number of contributors engaging in the development process. However, an efficient open source software project is not guaranteed simply by active participation by many; a coordination mechanism is needed to seamlessly manage the multi-party collaboration. On this basis, this study aimed to examine the internal regulatory processes based on Git and GitHub, which serve as such a mechanism, and redefine the efficiency of open source software projects to fully reflect them. For this purpose, a two-stage data envelopment analysis was used to measure the project efficiency reflecting the internal processes. Moreover, this study considered the Kruskal–Wallis test and Tobit regression analysis to examine the effects of the participation by many on an open source software project based on the newly defined efficiency. Results show that a simple increase in contributors can be poisonous in terms of the efficiency of open source software projects.

Highlights

Open source software (OSS) does not refer to software distributed for free
Data envelope analysis (DEA) is a method that is used to measure the comparative efficiency of decision making units (DMUs) with multiple inputs and outputs [13]
data envelopment analysis (DEA) is useful for OSS whose production process is complex and difficult to define because DEA derives an efficient frontier using empirical data without explicitly assuming the production function and measures the efficiency of each object of evaluation based on its distance from the frontier [14]

Summary

Introduction

Open source software (OSS) does not refer to software distributed for free. It is a concept that allows the actual usage of software, and free redistribution, which means anyone can access and modify the original source code to produce derivative products for their sustainability [1]. Several scholars have taken an interest in the efficiency of OSS projects and have presented their own interpretations. Among such scholars, Ghapanchi and Aurum [7], Wray and Mathieu [8], and Koch [9] utilized DEA to measure relative efficiency. This study utilized the partial least square (PLS) method to determine the positive influence of the four competencies of the theory of competency rallying (TCR) on the OSS project performance. The four capabilities of TCR—identification of market needs, marshalling of competencies, development of competencies, and managing cooperative work—are the independent variables of the research model; the OSS project performance, composed of developer interest and project efficiency, is the dependent variable. The subjects of the analysis were projects on the OSS development platform Sourceforge.net; in order to secure homogeneity, 607 projects in the software development category were selected

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion