Germany Leads In Open-Source Development

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November 01, 2000 (4:54 PM EST)

SEATTLE -- Paul Jones, director of ibiblio.org, had a hunch about where to find the largest concentration of contributors to the open-source software development, but little hard data existed about membership in collaborative open source communities.

So, the poet, professor, author, and computer scientist with a high forehead and hair that cascades over his shoulders set out to quantify his instincts.

Jones, a University of North Carolina journalism and library science professor and director of the UNC MetaLab and ibiblio, studied the demographics of the Linux developer community, counting the people who were contributing to open source.

He wanted to know where they came from and how large their contributions were. As part of that effort, Jones oversees ibiblio, an expansive collection of information on the Internet, created and maintained by the public.

Were there five of six people doing massive contributions to open source or hundreds of people doing one or two? Jones wanted to know.

It turns out that more than 50 percent were people adding just one or two pieces to the growing project. Jones estimates that 250,000 developers worldwide are involved in open-source work, either contributing code, writing documentation, or tracking bugs.

Jones was also keenly interested in where these people were coming from -- and the answer confirmed his initial suspicions.

"We knew the Germans were really active, but we didn't know how active," Jones said. "We were really knocked out when we saw the Germans were the second largest contributors."

Jones' research showed German contributions to open-source software were greater than people with .edu e-mail addresses, and also greater than the number of people with .org and .gov. e-mail addresses.

"The other thing we did is combined all the EU and treated it like one country," he said. "It turns out it would be greater than all the dot-coms."

Cultural variations may explain the preponderance of European open source developers, Jones said.

"If you are a German-speaking engineer, the only way you can play in software and have impact is in open source," he said. "Also there are countries that recognize the value of community. "

Europeans tend to place a greater emphasis on society, while Americans focus more on individualism, he said.

In a research paper titled, "A Quantitative Profile of a Community of Open Source Developers," Jones and his colleagues on the UNC Open Source Research Team (Bert J. Dempsey, Debra Weiss and Jane Greenberg) described their methodology.

The paper is on the Web at http://www.ibiblio.org/osrt/develpro.html.

The researchers examined collection statistics, including "custom monitoring scripts on the server, as well as an analysis of the contents of user-generated metadata embedded within the Archives," they wrote. "User-generated metadata files in a format known as the Linux Software Map (LSM) are required when submitting open-source software for inclusion in non-mirrored portions of the MetaLab Linux Archives.

"The over 4,500 LSMs in the Archives then provide a demographic profile of contributors of LSM-accompanied software as well as other information on this broad subset of the Linux community," the paper continued. "To explore repository evolution directly, an instrumented Linux Archives mirror was developed, and aggregate statistics on content changes seen over a month-long period are reported.

"In sum, our results quantify aspects of the global Linux development effort in dimensions that have not been documented before now, as well as providing a guide for more detailed future studies."

Looking at e-mail suffixes by author field, the researchers found that Europeans represented 37 percent of contributions; followed by 23 percent from .com addresses; 12 percent from .edu domains; 10 percent from .net; 7 percent from .org; and 11 percent from other sources.

"The demographics of contributors reveals a strikingly strong European influence within the Linux community," the researchers wrote.

Jones recently traveled to Seattle to participate in an IBM Corp. (stock: IBM) event designed to generate interest in writing code for open source and in IBM's free, online collection of content and resources focused on open standards known, as developerWorks.

In October, IBM donated $250,000 (mostly in the form of server hardware) to UNC to support Internet projects, including iBiblio. About two-thirds of the equipment in the grant will consist of IBM eServer xSeries running Linux to run the ibiblio information project.

Ibiblio is also partly operated in collaboration with Red Hat Center, a private foundation started by Red Hat Inc. (stock: RHAT) founders Bob Young and Marc Ewing.