{"title":"Characteristics of open source projects","authors":"A. Capiluppi, P. Lago, M. Morisio","doi":"10.1109/CSMR.2003.1192440","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Most empirical studies about Open Source (OS) projects or products are vertical and usually deal with the flagship, successful projects. There is a substantial lack of horizontal studies to shed light on the whole population of projects, including failures. This paper presents a horizontal study aimed at characterizing OS projects. We analyze a sample of around 400 projects from a popular OS project repository. Each project is characterized by a number of attributes. We analyze these attributes statically and over time. The main results show that few projects are capable of attracting a meaningful community of developers. The majority of projects is made by few (in many cases one) person with a very slow pace of evolution.","PeriodicalId":236632,"journal":{"name":"Seventh European Conference onSoftware Maintenance and Reengineering, 2003. Proceedings.","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2003-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"139","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Seventh European Conference onSoftware Maintenance and Reengineering, 2003. Proceedings.","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CSMR.2003.1192440","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 139
Abstract
Most empirical studies about Open Source (OS) projects or products are vertical and usually deal with the flagship, successful projects. There is a substantial lack of horizontal studies to shed light on the whole population of projects, including failures. This paper presents a horizontal study aimed at characterizing OS projects. We analyze a sample of around 400 projects from a popular OS project repository. Each project is characterized by a number of attributes. We analyze these attributes statically and over time. The main results show that few projects are capable of attracting a meaningful community of developers. The majority of projects is made by few (in many cases one) person with a very slow pace of evolution.