Inequalities in Open Source Software Development: Analysis of Contributor’s Commits in Apache Software Foundation Projects
Name
Chelkowski-2016-Inequalities in Open.pdf
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3.53 MB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Chełkowski, Tadeusz
Gloor, Peter A.
Jemielniak, Dariusz
Date Issued
April 2016
Journal
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Chełkowski, Tadeusz, Peter Gloor, and Dariusz Jemielniak. “Inequalities in Open Source Software Development: Analysis of Contributor’s Commits in Apache Software Foundation Projects.” Edited by Christophe Antoniewski. PLoS ONE 11, no. 4 (April 20, 2016): e0152976.
Version
Final published version
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 mailinglist 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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Collective Intelligence
Sloan School of Management
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152976
