Evolutionary Success of Open Source Software: An Investigation Into Exogenous Drivers

The "Success" of a Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) project has often been evaluated through the number of commits made to its configuration management system, number of developers and number of users. Based on Source-Forge, most studies have concluded that the vast majority of projects are failures. This paper argues that the relative success of a FLOSS project can depend also on the chosen forge and distribution. Given a random sample of 50 projects contained within a popular FLOSS forge (Debian, which is the basis of the successful Debian distribution), the authors compare these with a similar sample from SourceForge, using product and process metrics, such as size achieved and number of developers involved.