Inequalities in Open Source Software Development: Analysis of Contributor's Commits in Apache Software Foundation Projects

Tadeusz Chełkowski, Peter Gloor, Dariusz Jemielniak, Christophe Antoniewski
2016 PLoS ONE  
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
more » ... 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.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0152976 pmid:27096157 pmcid:PMC4838325 fatcat:r22d2d4yazbxnao6tgbbrrg66a