Impact of diversity on open source software

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between open source project diversity and success. The sample of open source projects includes all mature projects driven by the Eclipse Foundation as of February 2008. Three types of project diversity were used: i) organizational - measured by number of committers per organization per project, ii) contribution - measured by the number of commits made per organization per project, and iii) technical - measured by the number of commits made per given software file type. Success was measured by means of i) economic metrics, including the number of corporate adoptions and the number of jobs postings including the project name, and ii) development metrics, including the project popularity and the growth of the intensity of members' activity. The paper makes two main contributions. First, we contribute to the literature on open source software and diversity. Second, we introduce economic success metrics to the empirical assessment of open source software project success. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.