Understanding oss as a self-organizing process

We hypothesize that open source software development can be modeled as self-organizing, collaboration, social networks. We analyze structural data on over 39,000 open source projects hosted at SourceForge.net. We define two software developers to be connected — part of a collaboration social network — if they are members of the same project, or are connected by a chain of connected developers. Project sizes, developer project participation, and clusters of connected developers are analyzed. We find evidence to support our hypothesis, primarily in the presence of power-law relationships on project sizes (number of developers per project), project membership (number of projects joined by a developer), and cluster sizes.