Content area
This research applies Lotka's Law to metadata on open source software development. Lotka's law predicts the proportion of authors at different levels of productivity. Open source software development harnesses the creativity of thousands of programmers worldwide, is important to the progress of the Internet and many other computing environments, and yet has not been widely researched. Metadata is examined from the Linux Software Map (LSM), which documents many open source projects, and Sourceforge, one of the largest resources for open source developers. Authoring patterns found dare comparable to prior studies of Lotka's Law for scientific and scholarly publishing. Lotka's law was found to be effective in understanding software development productivity patterns, and offers promise in predicting aggregate behavior of open source developers.
Details
Open source software;
Metadata;
Linux;
Mathematical analysis;
Creativity;
Authoring;
Law;
Harnesses;
Internet;
Productivity;
Software development;
Freeware;
Product development;
Cataloging rules;
Dictionaries;
Library cataloging;
Scholarly publishing;
Public domain;
Bibliometrics;
Programmers;
Bibliographic control;
Lotka's Law;
Software;
Property;
Copyright