Innovation Diffusion in Open Source Software: Preliminary Analysis of Dependency Changes in the Gentoo Portage Package Database

In this paper we make the case that software dependencies are a form of innovation adoption. We then test this on the time-evolution of the Gentoo package dependency graph. We find that the Bass model of innovation diffusion fits the growth of the number of packages depending on a given library. Interestingly, we also find that low-level packages have a primarily imitation driven adoption and multimedia libraries have primarily innovation driven growth.