Modeling the Free/Open Source Software Community: A Quantitative Investigation

This chapter reports the latest results from an ongoing study of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) Development at the community level. Publicly available data about F/OSS projects, developers, processes, and their relationships have been collected from F/OSS hosting sites, including SourceForge and others. Numerous descriptive statistics, including the existence of many power-law relationships, are presented. The F/OSS community is modeled as a collection of ad hoc, social networks consisting of heterogeneous agents, self-organizing into projects and clusters of projects. A computer simulation of the F/OSS community model is developed using SWARM, an agent-based simulation toolkit. Empirical data is used to parameterize the simulation, which in turn is used to investigate hypotheses about processes and mechanisms leading to F/OSS community formation. The quantitative data, the model, and the simulation offer insight into F/OSS project coordination and communication.