开源软件增长测度的复制研究
A Replication Study on Measuring the Growth of Open Source
摘要：
内容：在过去的几十年里，开源软件已经渗透到软件行业，并已成为软件工程的关键支柱之一。开源的无与伦比的增长反映了这种扩散：以前的工作将开源描述为线性增长，多项式甚至指数增长。目的：在这项研究中，我们探讨了开源的长期增长，并通过复制以前关于衡量开源项目增长的研究来证实以前的发现。方法：我们使用Open Hub作为测量系统，在172，833个开源项目的样本上复制了四个现有的开源增长测量：我们分析了过去30年中已知开源领域的代码行，提交，新项目和开源贡献者的数量。结果如下：我们发现开源的增长已经耗尽：在最初的指数增长之后，所有的测量都显示出自2013年达到峰值以来的单调下降趋势。现有的增长模式都经不起时间的考验。结论：我们的研究结果对开源的增长和Open Hub作为描述开源的代理的代表性提出了更多的问题。我们讨论了我们的观察结果的多种解释，并鼓励使用替代数据集进行进一步的研究。
英文摘要：
Context: Over the last decades, open-source software has pervaded the software industry and has become one of the key pillars in software engineering. The incomparable growth of open source reflected that pervasion: Prior work described open source as a whole to be growing linearly, polynomially, or even exponentially. Objective: In this study, we explore the long-term growth of open source and corroborating previous findings by replicating previous studies on measuring the growth of open source projects. Method: We replicate four existing measurements on the growth of open source on a sample of 172,833 open-source projects using Open Hub as the measurement system: We analyzed lines of code, commits, new projects, and the number of open-source contributors over the last 30 years in the known open-source universe. Results: We found growth of open source to be exhausted: After an initial exponential growth, all measurements show a monotonic downwards trend since its peak in 2013. None of the existing growth models could stand the test of time. Conclusion: Our results raise more questions on the growth of open source and the representativeness of Open Hub as a proxy for describing open source. We discuss multiple interpretations for our observations and encourage further research using alternative data sets.
机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来，可能存在错误，请以论文正文为准。
