ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on their investigations of external indicators of success for both the SourceForge projects and the 17 well-known FLOSS projects. It describes their investigations of indicators of internal activity within the SourceForge projects. It results were significant for both the parametric statistics tests and the non-parametric tests for the CVS projects but not the (Subversion) SVN projects. The majority of attention directed at free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects seems to be directed at the big, successful projects. The chapter argues that as the FLOSS community evolves so the large OSS projects will take on increasingly formal structures and processes and so become increasingly different in kind to projects hosted on portals like SourceForge. The criteria could complement other OSS evaluation frameworks, such as the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative's (NOSI) primer on choosing and using free and open source software, and OSS Watch's Business Readiness Rating (BRR).