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Exploratory Analysis of Free and Open Source Software Ecology

2017; IGI Global; Linguagem: Inglês

10.4018/978-1-5225-3707-6.ch005

2327-0403

Software Engineering Research

Shared repositories provide a host of services to start and sustain a FOSS project. They also share the details of projects with researchers. Sourceforge.net is a popular and populous forge with total number of projects exceeding 400,000 and developers counting more than 3 million as of Jan 2015. The evolution of this forge is studied and it was found that there is a small slide in the number of developers since September 2011. The existence of power law in Sourceforge.net is confirmed. The visualisation of developer relations reveal that there is a separate core and periphery groups of developers in Sourceforge.net and this trend was found to repeat in other forges like Freecode and Rubyforge.