论文标题

一项关于测量开源生长的复制研究

A Replication Study on Measuring the Growth of Open Source

论文作者

Dorner, Michael, Capraro, Maximilian, Barcomb, Ann, Wnuk, Krzysztof

论文摘要

背景:在过去的几十年中,开源软件遍布软件行业,并已成为软件工程的关键支柱之一。开源的无与伦比的生长反映了Pervasion:先前的工作将开源描述为整体,以线性,多项式甚至指数呈线性生长。 目的:在这项研究中,我们通过复制先前关于测量开源项目增长的研究来探讨开源的长期增长并证实了先前的发现。 方法:我们在172,833个开源项目的样本中复制了四个有关开源的测量值:我们在过去30年中分析了代码,提交,新项目,新项目和开源贡献者的数量的线条。 结果:我们发现开源的增长要耗尽:在初始指数增长之后,所有测量值都显示自2013年达到顶峰以来的单调向下趋势。现有的增长模型都无法进行时间的考验。 结论:我们的结果提出了有关开源增长以及开放式枢纽的代表性的更多问题,作为描述开源的代理。我们讨论了有关观察结果的多种解释,并鼓励使用替代数据集进行进一步的研究。

Context: Over the last decades, open-source software has pervaded the software industry and has become one of the key pillars in software engineering. The incomparable growth of open source reflected that pervasion: Prior work described open source as a whole to be growing linearly, polynomially, or even exponentially. Objective: In this study, we explore the long-term growth of open source and corroborating previous findings by replicating previous studies on measuring the growth of open source projects. Method: We replicate four existing measurements on the growth of open source on a sample of 172,833 open-source projects using Open Hub as the measurement system: We analyzed lines of code, commits, new projects, and the number of open-source contributors over the last 30 years in the known open-source universe. Results: We found growth of open source to be exhausted: After an initial exponential growth, all measurements show a monotonic downwards trend since its peak in 2013. None of the existing growth models could stand the test of time. Conclusion: Our results raise more questions on the growth of open source and the representativeness of Open Hub as a proxy for describing open source. We discuss multiple interpretations for our observations and encourage further research using alternative data sets.

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