Evolution in Open Source Software: A Case Study

13 years 9 months ago

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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

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