Correlation Analysis of Popularity and Interoperability in Open Source Projects

Abstract

In order to examine the success of open source projects, we analyzed 252,008 projects in the SourceForge database. We restricted our study to projects that are written in the top ranked programming languages. We measured the correlation between popularity, interoperability, productivity and the success rate of each project. The developers' contribution to the project was also examined in terms of the developer’s team size, and the success in terms of the total number of committers (contributors). Our results indicate that using multiple programming languages requires additional team members. Also, there is a significant increase in the functionality of the developed project. The results also demonstrated that there is a positive correlation between the development team size, and the total number of committers.