Evolutionary Success of Open Source Software: an Investigation into Exogenous Drivers

The “success” of a Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) project has often been evaluated through the number of commits made to its configuration management system, number of developers and number of users. Based on SourceForge, most studies have concluded that the vast majority of projects are failures. This paper argues that the relative success of a FLOSS project depends also on the chosen forge and distribution: given a random sample of 50 projects contained within a popular FLOSS forge (Debian, which is the basis of the successful Debian distribution), we compared these with a similar sample from SourceForge, using product and process metrics, like size achieved and developers involved. The results show at first that, depending on the forge of FLOSS projects, researchers can draw different conclusions on the overall concept of success of FLOSS software. Secondly, the projects included in the Debian distribution benefit, on average, from a larger evolutionary activity and a larger number of developers than the comparable projects on SourceForge. Finally, the Debian projects benefit from more activity and more developers from the point at which they joined this distribution.