The International Conference on Computer and Mathematical Sciences 2010 29 June 2010, Yogyakarta, Indonesia 1 Statistical Analysis of the Open Source Software Projects from Sourceforge.net Andi Wahju Rahardjo Emanuel #1 , Retantyo Wardoyo *2 , Jazi Eko Istiyanto *3 , Khabib Mustofa *4 # Bachelor Informatics, Faculty of Information Technology, Maranatha Christian University Jl. Prof. Drg. Suria Sumantri 65 Bandung, INDONESIA 1 awreman@gmail.com * Department of Computer Science and Electronics, Gadjah Mada University Jl. Sekip Utara, Sleman, Yogyakarta, INDONESIA 2 rw@ugm.ac.id 3 jazi@ugm.ac.id 4 khabib@ugm.ac.id Abstract— This paper presents the statistical analysis of Open Source Software (OSS) Projects crawled from sourceforge.net portal. Among many available OSS project development portals, sourceforge.net is selected since it is considered the largest small-to-medium OSS Project development portal with total of more than 160 thousands registered projects during the period of observation (January 2010). There are total 134,549 OSS projects that are successfully recorded with more than 28 parameters such as project's name, audience, audience count, database environment, database count, description, developer, development status, development status count, number of download, filename, file size, operating system, operating system count, programming language, programming language count, review, thumb (up and down), topic, topic count, translation, translation count, user interface, and user interface count. The result of this statistical analysis should provide the snapshot of the current trends and progresses in OSS Project, especially those which are developed using development portal. Keywords— Open Source, Open Source Software Project, statistical analysis, sourceforge.net, small-to-medium I. INTRODUCTION Open Source Software (OSS) nowadays becomes a familiar term in Information Technology and Computer Science. This “method” was initially started by academics to communicate and exchange ideas in the form of software applications in their spare time, and then it was slowly getting wider recognition as one of the mainstream movement challenging the already established Software Engineering methodology. OSS is a software development methodology that allows developers to collaboratively download, modify, and improve the source code via Internet as the medium of communication. These developers are usually a form of group called Open Source Communities and the development process is called OSS Project. The method of developing source code in OSS is mostly consisting of building new features and fixing bugs [2] which is called 'bazaar-like' compared to 'cathedral-like' in modern Software Engineering methodology [12]. Interestingly, this seemingly chaotic and 'bazaar-like' development strategy is finally proving itself to be able to produce high quality software applications such as Apache web server, Linux Operating System, Mozilla web browser, etc. Since the development of software in OSS seems to be chaotic in nature, the existence of OSS development portals may eliminate some of the problems. One of the largest OSS development portals is sourceforge.net which hosted more than 226K projects (observed in April 2010). This portal provides free web hosting space with many integrated tools that are useful to the project initiators and interested developers for developing their project collaboratively such as CVS for version control, bug tracking, mailing list, wiki, etc. This paper presents statistical analysis of OSS Projects hosted in sourceforge.net which was crawled during the month of January 2010 with total 134,549 out of 160,141 registered OSS projects. This statistical analysis should provide snapshot of the current trends and progresses of OSS Projects that is useful for future research in this area. II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ON OSS PROJECTS Open Source Software (OSS) is software developed using a methodology based on several distinct characteristics not found in commercial / proprietary software: • The source code of the application is freely available for everybody to download, improve and [12]. • People who contribute to the development of the Open Source projects is usually forming a group called Open Source Communities which is completely voluntary [2][3]. • The primary concern of the developers in Open Source Software Projects are building features and fixing bugs [5]. During the development of OSS, the developers and communities depend on some collaborative tools. Some of these tools are CVS (Concurrent Version System) which is used as the repository and version control of the source code, Bug Database software such as Bugzilla or TRAC which is used to keep track of all the bugs during development, TODO List / Wish List to 978-967-5741-01-2 © 2010