https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00345-7
Regular Article
The penumbra of open source: projects outside of centralized platforms are longer maintained, more academic and more collaborative
1
Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA
2
Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA
3
Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA
Received:
16
July
2021
Accepted:
9
May
2022
Published online:
21
May
2022
GitHub has become the central online platform for much of open source, hosting most open source code repositories. With this popularity, the public digital traces of GitHub are now a valuable means to study teamwork and collaboration. In many ways, however, GitHub is a convenience sample, and may not be representative of open source development off the platform. Here we develop a novel, extensive sample of public open source project repositories outside of centralized platforms. We characterized these projects along a number of dimensions, and compare to a time-matched sample of corresponding GitHub projects. Our sample projects tend to have more collaborators, are maintained for longer periods, and tend to be more focused on academic and scientific problems.
Key words: Open source / Teamwork / Collective dynamics / Online social networks
The original online version of this article was revised: a wrong figure appeared as Fig. 5; this has been corrected.
A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00348-4.
Copyright comment corrected publication 2022
© The Author(s) 2022. corrected publication 2022
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