Cave or Community? An Empirical Examination of 100 Mature Open Source Projects

By S. Krishnamurthy. First Monday, 2002

415 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 numbers 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 was positively correlated to the age of the project. Fifth, the larger the project, the smaller the percent of project administrators.

Subfields: Communication, Computer Science Applications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2fc0516f700b490b7e13db0f0d73d05afa5e346c

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Citations in the corpus

Information systems success in free and open source software development: theory and measures (2006, methodology): “System Use Interest Sourceforge page views (Krishnamurthy, 2002; Stewart & Gosain, 2004) (Crowston et al.”
The Impact of Ideology on Effectiveness in Open Source Software Development Teams (2006, background): “While these projects are interesting and important, they may not be representative of the majority of OSS projects, which have attained much lower levels of participation and prominence (Krishnamurthy 2002).”
The social structure of free and open source software development (2005, methodology): “However, in these plots the distance between nodes is an approximation of the strength of the ties, using the spring embedding algorithm of Kamada and Kawai (1989) .”
Impact of license choice on Open Source Software development activity (2009, background): “Project home pages containing basic data such as project name, registration date, and so forth also have been a data source for extant empirical work (Krishnamurthy, 2002).”
Understanding Sustained Participation in Open Source Software Projects (2009, background): “Despite the notable success stories, many more OSS projects have failed, frequently due to insufficient volunteer participation [13, 27, 37].”
Socialization in an Open Source Software Community: A Socio-Technical Analysis (2005, background): “OSS projects vary across a number of dimensions (e.g. Krishnamurthy, 2002): age (number of years in existence), maturity (''1.0'' and above software versus beta or alpha versions), number of developers, type of software developed, successful or failed projects, etc.”
Impacts of License Choice and Organizational Sponsorship on User Interest and Development Activity in Open Source Software Projects (2006, background): “Lerner and Tirole (2005) suggested that the licensing restrictions outlined above serve to protect the interests of developers by limiting the possibility of commercial exploitation of their contributions by third parties.”