Population dynamics in open source communities
Pablo Loyola, In‐Young Ko · 2014
Open Source Software (OSS) has gained high amount of popularity during the last few years. It is becoming used by public and private institutions, even companies release portions of their code to obtain feedback from the community of voluntary developers. As OSS is based on the voluntary contributions of developers, the number of participants represents one of the key elements that impact the quality of the software. In order to understand how the the population of contributors evolve over time, we propose a methodology that adapts Lotka-Volterra-based biological models used for describing host-parasite interactions. Experiments based on data from the Github collaborative platform showed that the proposed approach performs effectively in terms of providing an estimation of the population of developers for each project over time.