"Open Source Software (OSS) is an innovative method of developing software applications that has been very successful over the past eight to ten years. A number of theories have emerged to explain its success, mainly from economics and law. We analyze a very large sample of OSS projects and find striking paterns in the overall structure of the development community. The distribution of projects on a range of activity measures is spectacularly skewed, with only a relatively tine number of projects showing evidence of of the strong collaborative activity which is supposed to characterize OSS..."
[Editor's Note: This link is used with permission from the author, who asked us to remind readers that it's still a working paper and subject to revision.]
