Relating and Clustering Free/Libre Open Source Software Projects and Developers: A Social Network Perspective

In this article a perspective of relating various Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects and linking different FLOSS developers is given. Specifically, by viewing projects and developers as characterized by their choices of features such as intended audiences, licenses, programming languages, operating systems, and topics, two-mode networks are generated to link projects (or developers) to their feature choices. Based on the generated networks, similarities among projects and among developers are calculated, and projects (or developers) are clustered through their measured similarities. Implication to this perspective can be the provision of project and developer recommendation services to extend developers' social networks beyond their participated projects and also to facilitate the sharing of information. This perspective also opens the possibility of discovering free software ideologists in FLOSS community.