The Total Growth of Open Source

Hello everyone,

we recently measured the growth of much of the active code base of open
source as well as number of active projects and could best explain it
using an exponential model. We have found these results, as
straightforward as they may be, quite helpful when making our case for
funding further open source research, and I thought, so might you. I
have appended the reference to the paper.

Cheers,
Dirk

Title: The Total Growth of Open Source

Authors: Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle

Abstract: Software development is undergoing a major change away from a
fully closed software process towards a process that incorporates open
source software in products and services. Just how significant is that
change? To answer this question we need to look at the overall growth of
open source as well as its growth rate. In this paper, we quantitatively
analyze the growth of more than 5000 active and popular open source
software projects. We show that the total amount of source code as well
as the total number of open source projects is growing at an exponential
rate. Previous research showed linear and quadratic growth in lines of
source code of individual open source projects. Our work shows that open
source is expanding into new domains and applications at an exponential
rate.

Reference: In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Open Source
Systems (OSS 2008). Springer Verlag, 2008, to appear.

http://www.riehle.org/publications/2008/the-total-growth-of-open-source/



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