Open source software development and Lotka's Law: Bibliometric patterns in programming

被引：37

作者：

Newby, GB ^{[1
]}

Greenberg, J ^{[1
]}

Jones, P ^{[1
]}

机构：

[1] Univ N Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 USA

来源：

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY | 2003年 / 54卷 / 02期

关键词：

D O I：

10.1002/asi.10177

中图分类号：

TP [自动化技术、计算机技术];

学科分类号：

0812 ;

摘要：

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. We examine metadata 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 are 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 offer promise in predicting aggregate behavior of open source developers.

引用

页码：169 / 178

页数：10