Describing the Software Forge Ecosystem

Code forges are online software systems that are designed to support teams doing software development work. There have been few if any attempts in the research literature to describe the web of people, projects, and tools that make up the free, libre, and open source (FLOSS) forge ecosystem. The main contributions of this paper are (1) to introduce a classification of FLOSS-oriented forges according to their characteristics, (2) to describe the forge-level and project-level data and artifacts currently available at each FLOSS forge, (3) to show various patterns already discovered in the FLOSS forge ecosystem, such as timelines of creation or arrangements by size or feature, (4) to make some recommendations to forge providers and data collectors about how to expose the structure and information in the forges, and (5) to describe the effort needed to extend our publicly-available information about the FLOSS forge ecosystem into the future.