Evolution and Growth in Large Libre Software Projects

Software evolution research has recently focused on new development paradigms, studying whether laws found in more classic development environments also apply. Previous works have pointed out that at least some laws seem not to be valid for these new environments and even Lehman has labeled those (up to the moment few) cases as anomalies and has suggested that further research is needed to clarify this issue. In this line, we consider in this paper a large set of libre (free, open source) software systems featuring a large community of users and developers. In particular, we analyze a number of projects found in literature up to now, including the Linux kernel. For comparison, we include other libre software kernels from the BSD family, and for completeness we consider a wider range of libre software applications. In the case of Linux and the other operating system kernels we have studied growth patterns also at the subsystem level. We have observed in the studied sample that super-li...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IWPSE
• Authors: Gregorio Robles, Juan José Amor, Jesús M. González-Barahona, Israel Herraiz
• Keywords: IWPSE 2005, Libre Software, Libre Software Kernels, Software Evolution