MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies), Department at Kozminski University, Warszawa, Poland.
PLoS One. 2021 Sep 23;16(9):e0257192. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257192. eCollection 2021.
As Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) increases in importance and use by global corporations, understanding the dynamics of its communities becomes critical. This paper measures up to 21 years of activities in 1314 individual projects and 1.4 billion lines of code managed. After analyzing the FOSS activities on the projects and organizations level, such as commits frequency, source code lines, and code comments, we find that there is less activity now than there was a decade ago. Moreover, our results suggest a greater decrease in the activities in large and well-established FOSS organizations. Our findings indicate that as technologies and business strategies related to FOSS mature, the role of large formal FOSS organizations serving as intermediary between developers diminishes.
随着自由和开源软件（FOSS）在全球企业中的重要性和使用不断增加，了解其社区的动态变得至关重要。本文对 1314 个项目和 14 亿行代码进行了长达 21 年的活动分析。在分析了项目和组织层面的 FOSS 活动，如提交频率、源代码行数和代码注释之后，我们发现现在的活动比十年前有所减少。此外，我们的研究结果表明，大型成熟的 FOSS 组织的活动减少幅度更大。我们的研究结果表明，随着与 FOSS 相关的技术和商业策略的成熟，大型正式 FOSS 组织作为开发者之间的中介的角色正在减弱。
