Statistical analysis of popular open source software projects and their communities

Open Source Software (OSS) becomes one of the mainstream software development methodology competing with commercial and proprietary software development. One of the distinct characteristics of OSS projects is the existence group of contributors who joined the project voluntarily called OSS Communities. In this study, the statistical analysis of 263 popular OSS Projects and their communities is performed. The popularity of the OSS Projects is determined from suggestion from selected websites found from Google search engine. The analysis covers information such as OSS Project´s name, description, category, repository, community type, number of contributors, and the start year. There are four important findings of the statistical analysis. First finding is that most of the category of the OSS Projects is computer and networking related. The other findings are that most of the project is in Ad Hoc state and the different trends in the number of contributors in Foundation and Commercial Company of OSS Communities. The last finding is that most of the OSS Projects are using Github, Sourceforge and Ohloh as their source code repositories. These results provide important insights about the structure and activities of OSS Projects and their communities.