Open source software development and Lotkaʹs Law: Bibliometric patterns in programming

This research applies Lotkaʹs Law to metadata on open source software development. Lotkaʹs Law predicts the proportion of authors at different levels of productivity. Open source software development harnesses the creativity of thousands of programmers worldwide, is important to the progress of the Internet and many other computing environments, and yet has not been widely researched. We examine metadata from the Linux Software Map (LSM), which documents many open source projects, and Sourceforge, one of the largest resources for open source developers. Authoring patterns found are comparable to prior studies of Lotkaʹs Law for scientific and scholarly publishing. Lotkaʹs Law was found to be effective in understanding software development productivity patterns, and offer promise in predicting aggregate behavior of open source developers.