A Large Crawl and Quantitative Analysis of Open Source Projects Hosted on SourceForge

Abstract

The subject of this work is to demonstrate how some very interesting statistics of open source projects hosted on SourceForge can be retrieved effortlessly and at low-cost. This crawled information later constitutes an ideal input for quantitative analysis of the open source movement in general. We present the full process of our experiment from crawling the data to performing the analysis. This work was started when no such information existed in literature. While performing the crawl, we found out about another project of similar nature, OssMole [2]. We provide the results of this experiment nonetheless because the two projects use different strategies for crawling data. Using OssMole’s data also lets us make some interesting cross-comparisons and derive conclusions about temporal changes going on at SourceForge.