On Clusters in Open Source Ecosystems

This paper seeks to find characteristics of relationships between developers within various clusters of FLOSS ecosystems. We have mined the repository of the open source programming language Ruby, and linked developers and projects on the basis of collaboration. We used Social Network Analysis, and more specifically, the concept of modularity to expose underlying clusters or sub-communities. A survey was constructed to aid in the qualitative part of this research. The data shows that Ruby’s ecosystem consist mostly of single developers who work independently. Developers within clusters of a few developers often have personal relationships formed through friendship, work and the open source community. Personal relationships formed through the open source community grow as clusters consist of more developers. Developers in clusters with large number of developers are often unaware of friend-of-friend relationships. Project administrators, however, fail to list developers that contribute through pull/request issues as authors, making data on Ruby’s repository incomplete.