SOS - Evol 2013 : Seminar on Open Source Evolution

Maelick Claes

Maelick Claes is a PhD student at the Software Engineering Lab of the Faculty of Sciences, University of Mons, Belgium.

Tom Mens

Tom Mens is a professor and head of the Software Engineering Lab of the Faculty of Sciences, University of Mons, Belgium.

Migration patterns of open source ecosystem contributors - An empirical case study with GNOME

Abstract of talk. We present our emerging research on evolving open source software ecosystems, collections of software projects maintained by the same community. Within such an ecosystem we aim to understand how contributors join, leave and move across different projects over time. In particular, we study where new contributors to a given subsystem come from, and where people go to if they stop contributing in this subsystem. We define novel metrics that measure the attractivity and repulsivity of an ecosystem's subsystem. We hypothesize that contributors joining or leaving a subsystem tend to come from, or go to, other projects belonging to its encompassing ecosystem. We verify this hypothesis by carrying out an empirical case study on the GNOME ecosystem and its two subsystems Evolution and Nautilus.

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