Community Structure in OSS Projects

The structure and organization of people who work on any complex software project can in large part affect the quality and design. Unlike traditional software, Open Source Software (OSS) Projects have no mandated organizational structure. Rather the community is a self organizing and very dynamic entity. Due to the wealth of recorded information regarding open source projects, the organization of the community and changes to it can be observed and analyzed. The authors believe that subcommunities form within large and complex OSS projects such as the Apache web server due to the number of volunteers and the various subsystems within the codebase.