[ Thanks to Jonathan Matthews for
this link. ]
“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.]
Complete
Story (24-page PDF document)