New DISTRACT paper: "Who makes open source code? The hybridisation of commercial and open source practices"
DISTRACT researchers Anna Sapienza, Eva Iris Otto, and Peter Mehler just published the paper "Who makes open source code? The hybridisation of commercial and open source practices" in EPJ Data Science.
Addressing a lack of quantitative studies exploring the increasing integration of private corporations into F/OSS practices the DISTRACT researchers model the power dynamics and infrastructural aspects of software production within GitHub, a central hub for F/OSS development, using a large-scale, directed network. Using various network statistics, the authors detect the ecosystem’s most impactful actors and find a nuanced picture of the influence of individuals, open source organizations, and private corporations in F/OSS practices. Sapienza, Otto, and Mehler find that the majority of public repositories on GitHub depend on a small core of specialized repositories and users that consisting primarily of individuals and open source organizations, but also of a significant amount of private organizations with an indirect, yet consistent influence within GitHub. Their research highlights a hybridization of F/OSS and sheds light on the complex interplay between influence, power, and code production in the multi-language dependency ecosystem of GitHub.
Follow this link to read the full paper.