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The Total Growth of Open Source

March 14th, 2008 · 5 Comments · Open Source, Publication, Research

Authors: Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle

Abstract: Software development is undergoing a major change away from a fully closed software process towards a process that incorporates open source software in products and services. Just how significant is that change? To answer this question we need to look at the overall growth of open source as well as its growth rate. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the growth of more than 5000 active and popular open source software projects. We show that the total amount of source code as well as the total number of open source projects is growing at an exponential rate. Previous research showed linear and quadratic growth in lines of source code of individual open source projects. Our work shows that open source is expanding into new domains and applications at an exponential rate.

Reference: In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2008). Springer Verlag, 2008. Page 197-209.

Available as a PDF file or in HTML, also see the Addendum.

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5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Wächst Freie Software exponentiell? — keimform.de // Apr 30, 2008 at 12:01

    [...] der Studie »The Total Growth of Open Source« untersuchten Amit Deshpande und Dirk Riehle mehr als 5000 populäre Open Source [...]

  • 2 Juho Vepsäläinen // Mar 13, 2009 at 15:04

    Hi,

    Thanks for sharing the paper. Here’s a bibtex entry for those interested:
    @InProceedings{ deshpande08,
    year = “2008″,
    author = “Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle”,
    title = “The Total Growth of Open Source”,
    booktitle = “Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Open Source Systems”,
    pages = “197–209″,
    publisher = “Springer Verlag”
    }

  • 3 Dirk Riehle // Mar 13, 2009 at 18:05

    @Juho — thanks!

  • 4 Coolest companies / projects « Luke Hutchison // Jul 6, 2009 at 12:02

    [...] well as the absolute amount of source code is best explained using an exponential model.” — Deshpande and Riehle 2008 (emphasis [...]

  • 5 Michael Nielsen » Introduction to the Polymath Project and “Density Hales-Jewett and Moser Numbers” // May 1, 2010 at 20:51

    [...] is just one project in a much broader ecosystem of open source projects. Deshpande and Riehle have conservatively estimated that more than a billion lines of open source software have been [...]

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