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ICSM
2000
IEEE

Evolution in Open Source Software: A Case Study

14 years 3 months ago
Evolution in Open Source Software: A Case Study
Most studies of software evolution have been performed on systems developed within a single company using traditional management techniques. With the widespread availability of several large software systems that have been developed using an “open source” development approach, we now have a chance to examine these systems in detail, and see if their evolutionary narratives are significantlydifferent from commercially developed systems. This paper summarizes our preliminary investigations into the evolution of the best known open source system: the Linux operating system kernel. Because Linux is large (over two million lines of code in the most recent version) and because its development model is not as tightly planned and managed as most industrial software processes, we had expected to find that Linux was growing more slowly as it got bigger and more complex. Instead, we have found that Linux has been growing at a super-linear rate for several years. In this paper, we explore t...
Michael W. Godfrey, Qiang Tu
Added 31 Jul 2010
Updated 31 Jul 2010
Type Conference
Year 2000
Where ICSM
Authors Michael W. Godfrey, Qiang Tu
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