Empirical studies of global volunteer collaboration in the development of free and open source software: analysis of six top ranked projects in sourceforge.net

  • Authors:
  • Krishna Raj P. M.;Srinivasa K. G.

  • Affiliations:
  • M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore;M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Sourceforge.net is the largest portal hosting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Among the projects available in sourceforge.net, six top ranked projects are selected for studying global volunteer collaboration patterns over a period of 6 years (2005-2011). It is found that a small set of volunteers do most of the work in these projects. The growth rate of volunteers, identification of core developers, join and drop rate of volunteers, task allocation and rate of task completion, movement of existing volunteers among different projects and the rate of new volunteer inclusion are also studied.