SourceForge.net is the world’s largest open source software development website, with the largest repository of open source code and applications available on the Internet. I recently completed an analysis of the SourceForge.net* community. My research was made possible by an NSF funded research project, “Understanding Open Source Software.” Under this NSF-backed project, the SourceForge Research Data Archive (SRDA), shares certain SourceForge.net data through monthly database dumps to the University of Notre Dame. The SRDA data are available to the academic and scholarly research community under a sublicense from SourceForge.net.
Month by Month Comparison
While the monthly dumps vary in frequency by the number of days between dumps, the month by month format provides an easy comparison. By counting the number of active projects for each month, it was easy to compare the project growth by month. For project data, the SRDA repository provides uninterrupted data from February 2005 up until June 2012.
From this simple monthly comparison, it was easy to see that the number of new projects began to increase in 2008 and really started to explode in 2011 and 2012. This rapid acceleration is not very clear on the month-by-month chart; however, when aggregated, it tells a compelling story.
Year by Year Comparison
When you compare the new project additions aggregated year by year, the trend is instantly clearer and more distinct. At the end of 2008, Sourceforge.net only had 168,217 projects, but quickly zoomed to nearly 368,251 by June 2012. That represents an almost 119 % increase in just over three years.
Conclusions
The data is clear. The user base is creating more projects than ever before. The question is: why? Has the ability to fork made it too easy for developers to splinter off their “own” version, enabling them to “scratch their own itches” in isolation?
While many people assert that GitHub is garnering almost all of the open source development, in my opinion and based upon my initial analysis of the SourceForge data, the SourceForge.net platform is still a leading platform in several ways. Most importantly, I think, is that they have almost double the number of users registered, and they’re still growing. With a growing user base and additional software, I believe that Sourceforge.net will continue to deliver on the site’s goals.
Additional data suggests that other linked behavior is happening simultaneously. There is something happening within the SourceForge.net community, and only additional research can answer what or why.
