The Ecology of Open-Source Software Development
Kieran Healy, Alan Schussman · 2003
Open Source Software (oss) is an innovative method of developing software applications that has been very successful over the past eight to ten years. A number of theories have emerged to explain its success, mainly from economics and law. We analyze a very large sample of oss projects and find striking patterns in the overall structure of the development community. The distribution of projects on a range of activity measures is spectacularly skewed, with only a relatively tiny number of projects showing evidence of the strong collaborative activity which is supposed to characterize oss. Our findings are consistent with prior, smaller-scale empirical research. We argue that these findings pose problems for the dominant accounts of oss. We suggest that the gulf between active and inactive projects may be explained by social-structural features of the community which have received little attention in the existing literature. We suggest some hypotheses that might better predict the observed ecology of projects. Besides the Internet itself, the most distinctive and widespread development in information technology since the mid-1990s has not been a particular software application, but rather a way of writing and distributing software in general. The rapid growth of the Open Source Software (oss) movement has astonished most observers. From modest beginnings, there are now thousands of active oss projects, ranging in scope from simple calculators