Mining large software compilations over time: another perspective of software evolution
Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories
Beyond source code: the importance of other artifacts in software development (a case study)
Journal of Systems and Software - Special issue: Selected papers from the 4th source code analysis and manipulation (SCAM 2004) workshop
Towards a Theoretical Model for Software Growth
MSR '07 Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories
Taking Research to FLOSS-Curious Engineers and Managers
FLOSS '07 Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development
Adapting the "staged model for software evolution" to free/libre/open source software
Ninth international workshop on Principles of software evolution: in conjunction with the 6th ESEC/FSE joint meeting
Measuring the evolution of open source software systems with their communities
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
Software evolution in open source projects—a large-scale investigation
Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice
Proceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories
Information Technology and Management
The Linux kernel as a case study in software evolution
Journal of Systems and Software
Perpetual development: A model of the Linux kernel life cycle
Journal of Systems and Software
The evolution of Java build systems
Empirical Software Engineering
Life and death of software packages: an evolutionary study of Debian
CASCON '12 Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
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Software evolution research has recently focused on new development paradigms, studying whether laws found in more classic development environments also apply. Previous works have pointed out that at least some laws seem not to be valid for these new environments and even Lehman has labeled those (up to the moment few) cases as anomalies and has suggested that further research is needed to clarify this issue. In this line, we consider in this paper a large set of libre (free, open source) software systems featuring a large community of users and developers. In particular, we analyze a number of projects found in literature up to now, including the Linux kernel. For comparison, we include other libre software kernels from the BSD family, and for completeness we consider a wider range of libre software applications. In the case of Linux and the other operating system kernels we have studied growth patterns also at the subsystem level. We have observed in the studied sample that super-linearity occurs only exceptionally, that many of the systems follow a linear growth pattern and that smooth growth is not that common. These results differ from the ones found generally in classical software evolution studies. Other behaviors and patterns give also a hint that development in the libre software world could follow different laws than those known, at least in some cases.