Open Source Development Around the World: A Comparative Study
This work provides insights into global open source development patterns, which is useful for researchers and practitioners in software engineering, but it is incremental as it applies existing tools to new data.
The study characterized 2,648 open source projects across 20 countries to analyze their distribution, popularity, programming languages, and correlation with GDP, while also assessing maintainability and code quality using BetterCodeHub.
Open source software has an increasing importance in our modern society, providing basic services to other software systems and also supporting the rapid development of a variety of end-user applications. Recently, world-wide code sharing platforms, like GitHub, are also contributing to open source's growth. However, little is known on how this growth is distributed around the world and about the characteristics of the projects developed in different countries. In this article, we provide a characterization of 2,648 open source projects developed in 20 countries. We reveal the number of projects per country, the popularity and programming language of each country's project and also show how the number of projects in a country correlates to its GDP. Finally, we assess the maintainability and internal code quality of the studied projects, using a tool called BetterCodeHub.