| Rishab Aiyer Ghosh on Mon, 8 May 2000 08:55:00 +0200 (CEST) |
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| [Nettime-bold] OFSS01: First Orbiten Free Software Survey |
OFSS01: The Orbiten Free Software Survey, 1st edition, May 2000
Copyright (C)2000 Orbiten Research - http://orbiten.org
May be distributed freely without modification.
Press contact, or for more information: ofss@orbiten.org
HEADLINE: Over 12,000 authors, 25 million lines of code analysed
Inside: FINDINGS
DATA
SCOPE AND METHOD
CONTEXT: ORBITEN
REFERENCES
The Free Software (or Open Source) "Community" is much talked
about, though little hard data on this community and its
activities is available. Here, for the first time, Orbiten
Research (see CONTEXT) provides a body of empirical data and
analysis to explain what this community actually is.
Simple facts, such as the number of developers contributing to
free software projects, the number of such projects and their
size have been until now unknown. The Orbiten Free Software
Survey discovers these facts, and aims with them to provide a
foundation for empirical research on the free software
community.
Building on the release of CODD[1] over a year ago, the Survey
will measure and track over time several aspects of the free
software economy including: the concentration (or diversity) of
contributions and contributors; the degree of intersection
between projects and sharing of code; the participation of
developers in different projects; volatility of changes to the
code base and the developer base.
There will also be some basic statistics and data gained during
the survey process - such as total size of free software
available, amount of free software being released and/or
modified each month, compendium of developers.
Hopefully the survey will be regular, prompt and gradually more
comprehensive, providing an important source of information for
academic researchers, free software users and developers alike.
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh & Vipul Ved Prakash: May 7, 2000
FINDINGS
The primary findings of OFSS01 were basic: the number of
developers authoring projects included in the survey (12706),
the size of the free software code base (1.04 Gigabytes, or
roughly 25 mil lines), the number of identifiable free software
projects (3149). Given the total lack of data on the free
software economy, rough indicators as to its size (limited by
the initial scope of the survey) are, we believe, a good start.
Secondary findings relate to the degree of contribution to the
code base by individual authors, defined for the purposes of
this survey as the smallest identifiable grouping claiming
credit for development of a software project. Unsurprisingly,
the Free Software Foundation came out well ahead of anyone else
by far, credited with 11% (124 Mb) of the entire surveyed code
base and involved in 17% (546) of all identifiable projects.
However, as with some other well-known (and highly ranked in the
survey) Unix authors, such as Sun Microsystems and the Regents
of the University of California, the FSF's position in our
charts stems largely from the lack of credit given to individual
programmers. A list of the top few contributors sorted by code
and involvement in projects is given below (see DATA).
Further findings relate to the distribution of authors among
projects, and code base contribution. The top 1271 authors, 10%
of the total, accounted for 72.3% of the total code base. The
top 10 authors alone (0.08% of the total) are credited for 19.8%
of the code base. Free software development may be distributed,
but it is most certainly very top heavy.
What goes for lines of code written goes for involvement in
projects too. Only the top 25 authors (0.19% of the total) were
credited with participation in more than 25 projects. The top
250 authors were credited with participation in over 5 projects,
and the vast majority (over 77%) of authors were only involved
in a single project. Our conclusion: Free software development
is less a bazaar of several developers involved in several
projects, more a collation of projects developed single-mindedly
by a large number of authors.
DATA
Number of identifiable authors: 12706
Uncredited/unidentifiable authors: 790
% of code base uncredited: 8.37%
Size of code base: +1116500467 Bytes or 1067 Mb.
Number of identifiable projects: 3149
Table 1: Top 10 authors ranked by contribution of code
Author % of total
free software foundation, inc 11.231
sun microsystems, inc 1.848
the regents of the university of california 1.359
gordon matzigkeit 1.216
paul houle 1.042
thomas g. lane 0.782
the massachusetts institute of technology 0.762
ulrich drepper 0.559
lyle johnson 0.528
peter miller 0.525
Table 2: Author contribution by decile
Authors % of total
top 10 authors 19.854
top decile (1271) 72.320
2nd decile 8.928
3rd decile 4.062
4th decile 2.384
5th decile 1.515
6th decile 1.008
7th decile 0.672
8th decile 0.440
9th decile 0.239
10th decile 0.060
Table 3: Top 10 authors ranked by participation in projects
Author Projects
free software foundation, inc 546
gordon matzigkeit 267
the regents of the university of california 156
ulrich drepper 142
roland mcgrath 99
sun microsystems, inc 66
rsa data security, inc 59
martijn pieterse 50
eric young 48
login-vern 47
Table 4: Author participation in projects
Projects Authors
> 25 25
6 - 24 211
3 - 5 928
Only 2 1924
Only 1 9617
Note: 211 authors participated in 6 to 24 projects, etc.
Further data, graphics and complete tables available at
orbiten.org
SCOPE AND METHOD
The first Orbiten Free Software Survey has been prepared based
on over 18 months of work in identifying, tracking and modeling
interaction in the free software economy. Clearly this was not
enough time, and the scope and methodology of the first survey
is far from ideal.
The technical task of identifying credits in poorly documented
source code was complex, especially given the vast and changing
nature of the code base. Credits are often not available, they
rarely follow a set format, and various heuristics have been
applied and "policy" decisions made on, for example, how to
divide credit among multiple listed authors. Details can be
found in the documentation for CODD[1].
The code base itself was limited. Although far from being a
complete set of all code ever released without payment on the
Internet - our ideal, eventual goal - we believe we have used a
fairly representative sample of software projects (released
under the GNU Public Licence and its variants) developed in
recent years.
The source code base for OFSS01 is:
* RedHat Linux v6.1 source rpms, including Linux kernel 2.2.14
* Munitions cryptography/security archive as on January 11,
2000 [http://munitions.vipul.net]
* Approximately 50% of source code available through Freshmeat
as on January 5, 2000. Explanation: source code is not
easily available for all projects on Freshmeat, at least
when accessed through an automated script with simple
intelligence. [http://freshmeat.net]
For each module or package analysed, source code is broken into
projects identified according to the package distribution.
Source code and some documentation files are scanned for
authorship, credit or copyright information, from which author
names are identified. Data collected includes, for each
identified author, number of bytes of code authored, number and
names of projects authored. From this the degree of
contribution, in terms of bytes of code can be calculated for
any given project. Project data is collated to form a broader
picture of authorship distribution, which can be examined at
several levels.
In this survey, very basic analysis has been performed. The next
survey will broaden the scope of analysis to include features
such as the degree of cross-participation between projects and
groups of authors.
The next survey - planned for June - will also use a bigger code
base. At the very least the code base will expand to include
Sourceforge [http://sourceforge.net], OpenBSD
[http://openbsd.org] and Perl CPAN libraries [http://cpan.org].
As the survey continues and becomes more frequent, we plan to
track changes in the code base over time (including historical
perspectives using older versions of, say, the Linux kernel) and
monitor movement between projects and groups.
CONTEXT: ORBITEN
Orbiten Research is devoted to the practical understanding of
Cooking-pot networks[2], the economic model for trans-monetary
phenomena on the Internet. A special focus is on developing
tools of measurement and generating data on the production, use
and trade in free ("open source") software.
Modelling communities and economic activity usually depends on
measurement, which is why it seems very hard to model cooking-
pot networks - such as the community of free software
developers. Orbiten plans to develop and use
various methods of getting around the "problems" of cooking-pot
networks, of modelling and understanding them so that their
benefits can be truly appreciated and worked with. A summary of
these methods can be found[3] on the Orbiten web site.
REFERENCES
[1] CODD documentation, Orbiten.
http://orbiten.org/codd/
[2] "Cooking-pot markets" by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, First Monday,
Issue 3 Volume 3 March 1998.
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/ghosh/
[3] "Identifying, tracking and measuring activity in cooking-pot
networks" by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Orbiten.
http://orbiten.org/summary.html
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