The penumbra of open source: projects outside of centralized platforms are longer maintained, more academic and more collaborative

TL;DR

This study explores open source projects outside GitHub, revealing they are longer maintained, more collaborative, and more academically oriented than platform-based projects, highlighting the diversity of open source development.

Contribution

It provides a novel, extensive dataset of non-GitHub open source projects and compares their characteristics to GitHub projects, revealing key differences in collaboration and focus.

Findings

Non-GitHub projects have more collaborators.

They are maintained longer than GitHub projects.

They focus more on academic and scientific problems.

Abstract

GitHub has become the central online platform for much of open source, hosting most open source code repositories. With this popularity, the public digital traces of GitHub are now a valuable means to study teamwork and collaboration. In many ways, however, GitHub is a convenience sample, and may not be representative of open source development off the platform. Here we develop a novel, extensive sample of public open source project repositories outside of centralized platforms. We characterized these projects along a number of dimensions, and compare to a time-matched sample of corresponding GitHub projects. Our sample projects tend to have more collaborators, are maintained for longer periods, and tend to be more focused on academic and scientific problems.