A Study of Work Distribution in Open Source Software Projects.

Abstract

We focus on the study of the contribution of the developers in open source projects by employing the Gini coefficient as a measure of the distribution of effort. Even though the Gini coefficient was used before, albeit in only a few studies and only until recently, this paper, in our knowledge, is the first one to utilize data extracted from a massive source of around 1.200 open source projects, varying in size and duration, thus describing what seems to be the norm, rather than a limited observation. We decided to research how developers contribute to OSS projects because we think that it’s one of the factors that indicate how viable is a project (i.e. how active — and in what way — is the community around it) and in an essence influences the decision (for individuals, academics and corporations) on whether or not to invest and get involved in an open source project.