As an update of our analyses on previous releases of OpenStack, today we present our analysis of company contributions to Grizzly, the new release of the project being published today. OpenStack is a well known free / open source software project providing facilities for building private and public clouds. It is also a good example of a development community in which almost all participants are affiliated to some company. Therefore, it is interesting to study how companies contribute to the project by means of their employees. This is exactly what we did in our analysis.
gvSIG is a is a geographic information system (GIS) software designed for capturing, storing, handling, analyzing and deploying any kind of referenced geographic information (more info in Wikipedia). It was born in 2004 as a project run by a public administration (the Regional Government of Valencia, Spain). 9 year later, gvSIG is a complete, mature platform, with a lively international development (and user) community. Many different products have been built based in, or forked from, it.
gvSIG development dashboard, by Bitergia
As usual, we have run our tools on it, producing our basic dashboard. For source code, we have analyzed the two main branches (roughly corresponding to 1.x and 2.x release lines) from their Subversion repository, for tickets we retrieved all we found, for mailing lists we got everything we could get from their Mailman repository.
Some interesting results are the share of contributions by the two main companies behind the project (Apple and Google), and how it has evolved from a project clearly driven by Apple, before 2009, to the current situation, with Google leading the top contributors table, and both Apple and Google being almost equal in contribution share over the whole history of the project. During the last years, it is also noteworthy how the diversity of the project is increasing, with new players starting to show a significant activity.
Today I’m contributing to SOS-Evol 2013 with the talk “Demographics of Linux kernel developers: how old are they?”, which presents a work in progress oriented towards understanding how the different “generations” of Linux kernel developers are evolving over time.
Presentation: Demographics of Linux kernel developers (slides)
WebKit is a well known free, open source software project which is producing the core of several of the most popular web browsers. Several companies (and other actors) are collaborating together to build this component, which is key to many of them. The two main players in WebKit are Apple and Google, but it is less known that there are many others participating actively as well. They are far away from the big players, but all together account for a sizable fraction of the total activity.
We at Bitergia are improving our reporting and visualizing tools. To demonstrate some of their new capabilities, we’ve done a complete activity analysis of the MediaWiki project, including their git repository, Bugzilla system and mailing lists. The analysis is complete in the sense that it includes all these sources, but it is basic in the sense that only bare automatic processing has been performed: no filtering of bots, no identification of special practices and data, no manual processing, etc.
Analysis of MediaWiki project
The analysis, in addition to showing several aspects of the activity in the MediaWiki project, is also a test of some of the new capabilities of our vizGrimoireJS visualization suite, specialized in showing the data collected with MetricsGrimoire tools from software development repositories.
After the preview of the analysis of Allura, we present another analysis on a software forge. And again, one derived from the software running SourceForge, although in this case derived from the old software that was running it around 2000: FusionForge. This software project is an offspring from GForge, which was itself an offspring of the last free version of the primitive SourceForge software.
Preview of the report on FusionForge
FusionForge was born in February 2009, when some of the developers of GForge decided to fork its GPL branch into a new project. GForge in turn was born in 2002, when the last free software version of the original SourceForge project (release 2.6) was merged with one of its forks, the Debian-sf project. Fortunately enough, the git repository maintained by the FusionForge team has all this history (which by the way, is described in more detail in the Wikipedia article about GForge), back to August 2001.
We at Bitergia have analyzed this git repository, along with the project mailing list archive, which starts on January 2009, with the birth of FusionForge. You can read some more details about this work-in-progress report in the rest of this post, or go straight to the preview we have prepared for you.
We have performed an analysis on its git (which stores the history of the changes to the source code) and Allura issue tracking (which stores all tickets and their state changes) repositories, and on its mailman archives (which stores messages sent to the project mailing lists).
With this report, we are also testing a new layout for the summary of a project, which shows in the same web page a condensed view of the main stats for each repository (on the central column), and some detailed charts about the same data (on the right column).
Today we’re presenting a preview of our analysis on Liferay at the Liferay Symposium Spain. We’ve analyzed Liferay public git and Jira repositories, which provide a good view of the public development activities around the project. Liferay Inc., the company, maintains another ticketing system for their customers as well, which we have not analyzed. However, all changes to the code seem to be done in the public git repository, and a large part of the activity with respect to ticket management (if not all) goes through the public Jira system at some point (even if initiated in the in-company tracking system).
