Open source software success: Measures and analysis

Despite a growing body of research on OSS production, much remains to be learned. One important issue concerns the measures of OSS project success and its determinants. In this paper, we empirically study the determinants of OSS success as measured by the number of subscribers and developers working on an OSS project. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our model forecasts these success measures more accurately as compared to a naive model.We find that OSS projects that develop software to work on Windows/UNIX/Linux operating systems, and developed using C or its derivative languages experience larger increase in subscribers and attract more developers than projects that do not have these characteristics. OSS projects with semi-restrictive licenses have fewer subscribers and attract fewer developers. Interestingly, OSS projects that accept financial donations and are targeted at IS/IT professionals have more subscribers than others, although these characteristics do not affect the developer base. The number of subscribers and developers increases with the age of the OSS project. Finally, the impact of developers on subscribers and subscribers on developers is positive and significant.     

Network ties and the success of open source software development

Prior network-based research on open source software (OSS) development has focused on the benefit of network ties and assumed all network ties play the same role. We adopt a fine-grained view of network relations to investigate the impact of network ties on the success of OSS development. Through examining the development of OSS projects hosted by SourceForge, we find that co-membership among project teams is an effective mechanism for building network ties, through which knowledge and expertise flows across projects in OSS community and, therefore, contributes to the success of OSS development. However, network ties among projects not only confer benefit, but also incur various cost, and due to the different growth patterns of cost and benefit, network ties have a diminishing return to project success. In addition, we find network ties of leader–follower type and follower–leader type are more beneficial to OSS success than other types of ties, and network ties connecting to projects of later development stages are more beneficial than those connecting to projects of earlier stages. Our study provides useful guidelines and suggestions as to how to leverage the knowledge and expertise of others for successful development of OSS projects.     

Virtual organizational learning in open source software development projects

We studied virtual organizational learning in open source software (OSS) development projects. Specifically, our research focused on learning effects of OSS projects and the factors that affect the learning process. The number and percentage of resolved bugs and bug resolution time of 118 SourceForge.net OSS projects were used to measure the learning effects. Projects were characterized by project type, number and experience of developers, number of bugs, and bug resolution time. Our results provided evidence of virtual organizational learning in OSS development projects and support for several factors as determinants of performance. Team size was a significant predictor, with mid-sized project teams functioning best. Teams of three to seven developers exhibited the highest efficiency over time and teams of eight to 15 produced the lowest mean time for bug resolution. Increasing the percentage of bugs assigned to specific developers or boosting developer participation in other OSS projects also improved performance. Furthermore, project type introduced variability in project team performance.     

A Longitudinal Study of the Impact of Open Source Software Project Characteristics on Positive Outcomes

This article formulates and tests a set of hypotheses about the success of open source software projects with respect to market penetration and human resource attraction. The authors collected data from 1025 open source software projects in a longitudinal study. The cross-sectional results show that the extent of a project’s operating systems, the range of translated languages, programming languages, and project age positively impact OSS projects’ positive outcomes with respect to market penetration and human resource attraction.     

Understanding knowledge sharing activities in free/open source software projects: An empirical study

Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects are people-oriented and knowledge intensive software development environments. Many researchers focused on mailing lists to study coding activities of software developers. How expert software developers interact with each other and with non-developers in the use of community products have received little attention. This paper discusses the altruistic sharing of knowledge between knowledge providers and knowledge seekers in the Developer and User mailing lists of the Debian project. We analyze the posting and replying activities of the participants by counting the number of email messages they posted to the lists and the number of replies they made to questions others posted. We found out that participants interact and share their knowledge a lot, their positing activity is fairly highly correlated with their replying activity, the characteristics of posting and replying activities are different for different kinds of lists, and the knowledge sharing activity of self-organizing Free/Open Source communities could best be explained in terms of what we called “Fractal Cubic Distribution” rather than the power-law distribution mostly reported in the literature. The paper also proposes what could be researched in knowledge sharing activities in F/OSS projects mailing list and for what purpose. The research findings add to our understanding of knowledge sharing activities in F/OSS projects.     

Identifying exogenous drivers and evolutionary stages in FLOSS projects

The success of a Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) project has been evaluated in the past through the number of commits made to its configuration management system, number of developers and number of users. Most studies, based on a popular FLOSS repository (SourceForge), have concluded that the vast majority of projects are failures.This study’s empirical results confirm and expand conclusions from an earlier and more limited work. Not only do projects from different repositories display different process and product characteristics, but a more general pattern can be observed. Projects may be considered as early inceptors in highly visible repositories, or as established projects within desktop-wide projects, or finally as structured parts of FLOSS distributions. These three possibilities are formalized into a framework of transitions between repositories.The framework developed here provides a wider context in which results from FLOSS repository mining can be more effectively presented. Researchers can draw different conclusions based on the overall characteristics studied about an Open Source software project’s potential for success, depending on the repository that they mine. These results also provide guidance to OSS developers when choosing where to host their project and how to distribute it to maximize its evolutionary success.     

TensorFlow开源软件社区中贡献修订的实证研究

人工智能(artificial intelligence, AI)的飞速发展得益于开源社区的开放协同,大量的开发者通过提交PR(pull-request)为AI开源软件做贡献.然而,外部贡献者所提交的PR质量参差不齐,开源项目管理团队需要对PR进行代码审查,并要求贡献者根据审查意见对PR进行修订. PR的修订过程对AI开源软件的质量有着重要的影响,因此对该过程进行更加全面、深入的实证研究很有必要.首先,从TensorFlow开源软件社区中收集一组PR的修订历史,通过对PR的代码提交信息以及审查评论进行定性分析,归纳总结PR修订类型的分类体系.其次,根据此分类体系人工标注一组修订数据集,并基于此数据集定量分析不同修订类型的频率分布、次序分布以及关联关系.研究结果表明:TensorFlow开源社区中的PR存在3大类共11种不同类型的修订,其中完善类修订出现的频率最高;此外,相比于其他类修订和完善类修订,修正类修订更常发生在PR的早期更新中;与结构相关的修订更有可能与其他类型的修订同现或邻现,配置修订以及变基修订有较大概率会接连出现.实证研究结果可帮助AI开源实践者和研究者更好地理解PR的修...     

Factors affecting the success of Open Source Software

With the rapid rise in the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in all types of applications, it is important to know which factors can lead to OSS success. OSS projects evolve and transform over time; therefore success must be examined longitudinally over a period of time. In this research, we examine two measures of project success: project popularity and developer activity, of 283 OSS projects over a span of 3 years, in order to observe changes over time. A comprehensive research model of OSS success is developed which includes both extrinsic and intrinsic attributes. Results show that while many of the hypothesized relationships are supported, there were marked differences in some of the relationships at different points in time lending support to the notion that different factors need to be emphasized as the OSS project unfolds over time.     

A Methodological Framework for Socio-Cognitive Analyses of Collaborative Design of Open Source Software

Open Source Software (OSS) development challenges traditional software engineering practices. In particular, OSS projects are managed by a large number of volunteers, working freely on the tasks they choose to undertake. OSS projects also rarely rely on explicit system-level design, or on project plans or schedules. Moreover, OSS developers work in arbitrary locations and collaborate almost exclusively over the Internet, using simple tools such as email and software code tracking databases (e.g. CVS).All the characteristics above make OSS development akin to weaving a tapestry of heterogeneous components. The OSS design process relies on various types of actors: people with prescribed roles, but also elements coming from a variety of information spaces (such as email and software code). The objective of our research is to understand the specific hybrid weaving accomplished by the actors of this distributed, collective design process. This, in turn, challenges traditional methodologies used to understand distributed software engineering: OSS development is simply too “fibrous” to lend itself well to analysis under a single methodological lens.In this paper, we describe the methodological framework we articulated to analyze collaborative design in the Open Source world. Our framework focuses on the links between the heterogeneous components of a project’s hybrid network. We combine ethnography, text mining, and socio-technical network analysis and visualization to understand OSS development in its totality. This way, we are able to simultaneously consider the social, technical, and cognitive aspects of OSS development. We describe our methodology in detail, and discuss its implications for future research on distributed collective practices.The order of the co-authors names is not significant.     

From Aristotle to Ringelmann: a large-scale analysis of team productivity and coordination in Open Source Software projects

Complex software development projects rely on the contribution of teams of developers, who are required to collaborate and coordinate their efforts. The productivity of such development teams, i.e., how their size is related to the produced output, is an important consideration for project and schedule management as well as for cost estimation. The majority of studies in empirical software engineering suggest that - due to coordination overhead - teams of collaborating developers become less productive as they grow in size. This phenomenon is commonly paraphrased as Brooks’ law of software project management, which states that “adding manpower to a software project makes it later”. Outside software engineering, the non-additive scaling of productivity in teams is often referred to as the Ringelmann effect, which is studied extensively in social psychology and organizational theory. Conversely, a recent study suggested that in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, the productivity of developers increases as the team grows in size. Attributing it to collective synergetic effects, this surprising finding was linked to the Aristotelian quote that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. Using a data set of 58 OSS projects with more than 580,000 commits contributed by more than 30,000 developers, in this article we provide a large-scale analysis of the relation between size and productivity of software development teams. Our findings confirm the negative relation between team size and productivity previously suggested by empirical software engineering research, thus providing quantitative evidence for the presence of a strong Ringelmann effect. Using fine-grained data on the association between developers and source code files, we investigate possible explanations for the observed relations between team size and productivity. In particular, we take a network perspective on developer-code associations in software development teams and show that the magnitude of the decrease in productivity is likely to be related to the growth dynamics of co-editing networks which can be interpreted as a first-order approximation of coordination requirements.     

开源软件自动化评估证据框架

互联网上已形成了规模巨大、种类丰富的开源软件资源。如何准确、快速地判断一个开源项目的各种可信属性是否满足需求是当前软件工程领域研究的热点。深入分析已有开源软件评估模型,总结互联网上软件质量相关的各种信息,提出了面向开源软件的可信评估证据框架,并基于该框架构建了一种开源软件可信证据查询平台。利用该平台能够极大地提高评估效率,用户可以准确、快速、全面地了解相关软件项目的各种信息。最后,以一个知名开源软件证实了该证据框架及证据查询平台的可行性。     

Volunteers’ involvement in online community based software development

We sought to gain understanding of voluntary developers’ involvement in open source software (OSS) projects. Data were collected from voluntary developers working on open source projects. Our findings indicated that a voluntary developer's involvement was very important to his or her performance and that involvement was dependent on individual motivations (personal software needs, reputation and skills gaining expectation, enjoyment in open source coding) and project community factors (leadership effectiveness, interpersonal relationship, community ideology). Our work contributes theoretically and empirically to the body of OSS research and has practical implications for OSS project management.     

Developer Role Evolution in Open Source Software Ecosystem: An Explanatory Study on GNOME

An open source software (OSS) ecosystem refers to an OSS development community composed of many software projects and developers contributing to these projects. The projects and developers co-evolve in an ecosystem. To keep healthy evolution of such OSS ecosystems, there is a need of attracting and retaining developers, particularly project leaders and core developers who have major impact on the project and the whole team. Therefore, it is important to figure out the factors that influence developers’ chance to evolve into project leaders and core developers. To identify such factors, we conducted a case study on the GNOME ecosystem. First, we collected indicators reflecting developers’ subjective willingness to contribute to the project and the project environment that they stay in. Second, we calculated such indicators based on the GNOME dataset. Then, we fitted logistic regression models by taking as independent variables the resulting indicators after eliminating the most collinear ones, and taking as a dependent variable the future developer role (the core developer or project leader). The results showed that part of such indicators (e.g., the total number of projects that a developer joined) of subjective willingness and project environment significantly influenced the developers’ chance to evolve into core developers and project leaders. With different validation methods, our obtained model performs well on predicting developmental core developers, resulting in stable prediction performance (0.770, F-value).     

Antecedents of open source software defects: A data mining approach to model formulation, validation and testing

This paper develops tests and validates a model for the antecedents of open source software (OSS) defects, using Data and Text Mining. The public archives of OSS projects are used to access historical data on over 5,000 active and mature OSS projects. Using domain knowledge and exploratory analysis, a wide range of variables is identified from the process, product, resource, and end-user characteristics of a project to ensure that the model is robust and considers all aspects of the system. Multiple Data Mining techniques are used to refine the model and data is enriched by the use of Text Mining for knowledge discovery from qualitative information. The study demonstrates the suitability of Data Mining and Text Mining for model building. Results indicate that project type, end-user activity, process quality, team size and project popularity have a significant impact on the defect density of operational OSS projects. Since many organizations, both for profit and not for profit, are beginning to use Open Source Software as an economic alternative to commercial software, these results can be used in the process of deciding what software can be reasonably maintained by an organization.     

The influence of project initiators’ person-to-person followership on project popularity in open source communities: The role of reach and importance

Person-to-person (P2P) followership is an important aspect of major open source software (OSS) development platforms. In this age of social media platforms, P2P followership has significantly shaped the way users engage in OSS development by facilitating the establishment of connections among OSS users. Despite the prevalence of P2P followership, less is known about the impact of OSS project initiators’ P2P followership nodes on their project popularity. This is a particularly important gap considering the low rate of OSS project success. We posit that OSS project initiators derive information and influence benefits from the quantity and connectivity of their P2P followership nodes, explaining the popularity of the projects initiated. We determine the connectivity of OSS project initiators’ P2P followership nodes based on the nodes’ reach and importance. To test the hypotheses, we use a large panel dataset collected over 24 months from GitHub. The findings indicate that the quantity of OSS project initiators’ P2P followership nodes including followers and followees has a positive effect on their project popularity. Moreover, such an effect is mostly dependent on the connectivity of the OSS project initiators’ P2P followership nodes in such a way that highly connected P2P followership nodes do not impact influence benefits but they increase information benefits. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.     

State inference for dynamically changing interfaces

Types in current programming languages specify constant sets of messages always acceptable throughout the lifetime of the types’ instances. However, especially in concurrent object-oriented systems, the acceptability of messages often changes with the objects’ states. We propose a typed concurrent object calculus where static type checking ensures that users send only acceptable messages although message acceptability may change dynamically. The programmer specifies in types predictable state changes and dependences of message acceptance on states; a compiler infers the needed state information. This state inference has polynomial time complexity and can be used together with subtyping.     

The faster the better? Innovation speed and user interest in open source software

It is often believed that for open source software (OSS) projects the faster the release, the better for attracting user interest in the software. Whether this is true, however, is still open to question. There is considerable information asymmetry between OSS projects and potential users as project quality is unobservable to users. We suggest that innovation speed of OSS project can signal the unobservable project quality and attract users’ interest in downloading and using the software. We contextualize innovation speed of OSS projects as initial release speed and update speed and examine their impacts on user interest. Drawing on the signaling theory, we propose a signaling effect through which a higher initial release speed or update speed increases user interest, while the effect diminishes as initial release or update speed increases. Using a large-scale panel data set from 7442 OSS projects on SourceForge between 2007 and 2010, our results corroborate the inverted U-shaped relationships between initial release speed and user downloads and between update speed and user downloads.     

Characteristics of Open Source Software Projects for the General Population: Reciprocity and Network Effects

In this paper, we conceptualize about, and empirically test for, differences between the more traditional Open Source Software (OSS) projects that are aimed towards techies-only and the projects that are aimed towards the general population. By drawing upon the theories of Reciprocity and Network Effects, we propose that OSS projects for techies-only are more likely to exhibit characteristics that are explained by balanced reciprocity, whereas OSS projects for the general population are more likely to show characteristics that are rooted in generalized reciprocity. In addition, we propose that local network effects can be used to explain certain characteristics of OSS projects for techies-only, whereas direct and indirect network effects shape the corresponding characteristics of OSS projects for the general population differently. The findings support our hypotheses and lead us to recommend actions for OSS projects targeted towards the general population, as well as suggestions for future research.