[wos] freie sw projekte: das werk einzelner?

[Volker Grassmuck]

Literaturhinweis:

Sandeep Krishnamurthy, Assistant Professor of E-Commerce and Marketing, 
Business Administration Program, University of Washington

Cave or Community? An Empirical Examination of 100 Mature Open Source 
Projects, in Firstmonday
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_6/krishnamurthy/

ABSTRACT
Starting with Eric Raymond’s groundbreaking work, The Cathedral and the 
Bazaar, open-source software (OSS) has commonly been regarded as work 
produced by a community of developers. Yet, given the nature of software 
programs, one also hears of developers with no lives that work very hard to 
achieve great product results. In this paper, I sought empirical evidence that 
would help us understand which is more common- the cave (i.e., lone 
producer) or the community. Based on a study of the top 100 mature products 
on Sourceforge, I find a few surprising things. First, most OSS programs are 
developed by individuals, rather than communities. The median number of
developers in the 100 projects I looked at was 4 and the mode was 1- 
numbers much lower than previous ones reported for highly successful 
projects! Second, most OSS programs do not generate a lot of discussion. 
Third, products with more developers tend to be viewed and downloaded more 
often. Fourth, the number of developers associated with a project is unrelated 
to the age of the project. Fifth, the larger the project, the smaller the percent of 
project administrators.


Kommentar:

Die Inder hamms aber auch mit der Statisterei (s.a. Rishab Ghosh). Find's im 
Vorgehen an einigen Stellen unklar und im Ergebnis nicht überzeugend. 
Widerspricht dem was Kalle Dalheimer, Lars Eilebrecht usw. über 
Projektstrukturen gesagt haben, aber KDE und Apache hat er wohl gar nicht 
dabei, weil die nicht auf Sourceforge liegen. Ein weiteres Problem: für 
Zahlenjongleure ist Sourceforge natürlich ideal, aber sie reflektieren nicht, was 
sie da nicht sehen. 

Gruß
Volker

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