Comments on: Estimating the number of active and stable FLOSS projects

By: Carlo Daffara

Carlo Daffara — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:19:47 +0000

For some of the forge sites that allows for data extraction, such a list can be obtained through the FLOSSMOLE data source. For those sites that have no search functionality, or that provide only part of their database in a searchable way, statistical methods were using based on a sampling approach, and in this case no list (just the numbers) can be obtained. It is important to understand that what we were looking at was a lower bound on the number of active and stable projects, not a “final” list.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:24:36 +0000

It would be very interesting to see that list of 18,000 stable, mature, active projects. Any plans to publish it?

By: Carlo Daffara

Carlo Daffara — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 06:47:13 +0000

As mentioned in the text, this is meant to provide a lower bound to the number of available, active and stable projects; as such, we have chosen a very strict definition of activity, and we used the project choice of “stability”, even considering that this lowers the number of suitable projects even more (there are many “beta” projects that are really stable). We already have found projects that are stable but not included in the count; an example is GNU make (that is stable, but having no new release in one year would not make it to the list).
It must be considered, however, that even projects that are more or less finished (no more bugs) may need a small recompile or modification to adapt to changing platforms and environments; in this sense, stable project with no release in one year should be considered an exception and not the rule. Using a simple sampling approach, we estimate that those are less than 2% of our original count, and so we would not rise the package count in a significant way. Our main objective was to demonstrate that the lower bound of the number of both stable and maintained packages was significant, and I believe that that result was reached.
Many thanks for your comment (and for reading the article thoroughly :-))

By: Bill Poser

Bill Poser — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 05:57:32 +0000

The activity criterion used underestimates the number of projects that provide useful software. A project may not have had a recent release because it is complete and has no known bugs, or no bugs significant enough to fix. Of course, it would be difficult to take this into account without a lot more work since it would be necessary to examine the status of each project.

By: Estimating the number of active and stable FLOSS… | Pilka

Estimating the number of active and stable FLOSS… | Pilka — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:30:25 +0000

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