Open AccessFree and Open Source Software organizations: A large-scale analysis of code, comments, and commits frequency
Author(s) -
Tadeusz Chełkowski,
Dariusz Jemielniak,
Kacper Macikowski
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0257192
Subject(s) - code (set theory) , open source software , software , source lines of code , open source , source code , computer science , business , scale (ratio) , software engineering , set (abstract data type) , programming language , physics , quantum mechanics
As Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) increases in importance and use by global corporations, understanding the dynamics of its communities becomes critical. This paper measures up to 21 years of activities in 1314 individual projects and 1.4 billion lines of code managed. After analyzing the FOSS activities on the projects and organizations level, such as commits frequency, source code lines, and code comments, we find that there is less activity now than there was a decade ago. Moreover, our results suggest a greater decrease in the activities in large and well-established FOSS organizations. Our findings indicate that as technologies and business strategies related to FOSS mature, the role of large formal FOSS organizations serving as intermediary between developers diminishes.