Analysis of Activity in the Open Source Software Development Community

Open source software is computer software for which the source code is publicly open for inspection, modification, and redistribution. While research of a few, large, successful projects have provided insights into the nature and practices of the open source software community; it still leaves open the question about the thousands of other open source projects which are neither large or highly successful. In this paper, we describe a data set of SourceForge.net, the world's largest open source software development site, which is available for research purposes; we discuss various data mining techniques that can be applied to the data and the type of research questions that can be answered. We apply a few of these techniques and provide analysis of the results