The Health and Wealth of OSS Projects: Evidence from Community Activities and Product Evolution
This work provides a novel approach for analyzing OSS project communities and evolution, though it is incremental in applying existing economic concepts to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of assessing the condition of open-source software (OSS) projects by applying a health and wealth framework from demography and economics, finding that wealthy projects attract casual contributors while less wealthy ones rely more on experienced contributors.
Background: Understanding the condition of OSS projects is important to analyze features and predict the future of projects. In the field of demography and economics, health and wealth are considered to understand the condition of a country. Aim: In this paper, we apply this framework to OSS projects to understand the communities and the evolution of OSS projects from the perspectives of health and wealth. Method: We define two measures of Workforce (WF) and Gross Product Pull Requests (GPPR). We analyze OSS projects in GitHub and investigate three typical cases. Results: We find that wealthy projects attract and rely on the casual workforce. Less wealthy projects may require additional efforts from their more experienced contributors. Conclusions: This paper presents an approach to assess the relationship between health and wealth of OSS projects. An interactive demo of our analysis is available at goo.gl/Ig6NTR.