A Quantitative Profile of a Community of Open Source Linux Developers
Bert J. Dempsey, Debra Weiss, Paul M. Jones, Jane Greenberg · 1999
Open source software, or free software, has generated much interest and debate in the wake of a number of high-impact applications and systems produced under open source models for development and distribution. Despite the high degree of interest, little hard data exists to-date on the membership of collaborative open source communities and the evolutionary process of their repositories. This paper contributes a baseline quantitative study of one of the oldest continuous repositories for the Linux open source project (the UNC MetaLab Linux Archives), including demographic information on its broad community of developers. Our methodology is a close examination of collection statistics, including custom monitoring scripts on the server, as well as an analysis of the contents of user-generated metadata embedded within the Archives. User-generated metadata files in a format known as the Linux Software Map (LSM) are required when submitting open source software for inclusion in non-mirrored...