Simple facts, such as the number of developers contributing to free software projects, the number of such projects, and their size, have been until now unknown. The Orbiten Free Software Survey answers some of these questions, and aims to provide a foundation for empirical research on the free software community. Building on the release of CODD over a year ago, the Survey measures and tracks over time several aspects of the free software economy. The survey over time will become more comprehensive, providing an important source of information for academic researchers, free software users, and developers. Secondary findings relate to the degree of contribution to the code base by individual authors, defined for the purposes of this survey as the smallest identifiable grouping claiming credit for development of a software project.
Further findings relate to the distribution of authors among projects, and code base contribution.
Free software development may be distributed, but it is most certainly very top heavy. What goes for lines of code written goes for involvement in projects too. The first Orbiten Free Software Survey has been prepared based on over 18 months of work in identifying, tracking, and modeling interaction in the free software economy. Clearly this was not enough time, and the scope and methodology of the first survey is far from ideal. The technical task of identifying credits in poorly documented source code was complex, especially given the vast and changing nature of the code base.