Evaluating the Quality and Quantity of Data on Open Source Software Projects

In this paper, we provide a preliminary evaluation of the quality and quantity of data on open source (OS) projects, provided at the SourceForge.net portal. We have derived a dataset of approximately 50000 projects from SourceForge. Using several indicators of project activity, we identify two samples from the entire dataset: the ‘most active’ OS projects (a total of 456 projects, ~0.9% of the entire dataset), and those projects with active code development (5826 projects, ~11.6%). The number of projects that are active across all of our main indicators of activity account for less than 1% of the projects on the portal. This suggests that many OS projects being registered on SourceForge are ‘impulse’ projects, which do not gather sufficient interest from developers or users to ‘activate’ those projects and make them ‘successful’. It also suggests that researchers, developers and users should be careful about how they use OS portals.