Is Free/Open Source Software dying?

An analysis of 21 years of activities in 1314 individual projects and 1.4 billion lines of code stored in OpenHub shows that the activity of Free/Open Source Projects is diminishing. It is especially visible among the large projects: their slowdown is significantly bigger than in the case of small and medium ones.

One possible explanation of this phenomenon is that, as technologies and business strategies related to FOSS mature, the role of large formal FOSS organizations serving as intermediary between developers diminishes. While in the beginning of Free/Open Source movement, it was attractive both because of its ideological appeal and the technological and organizational solution it offered (compartmentalizing work into small commits, manageable without the need for complex, hierarchical coordination).

As corporations grew and appropriated technological and organizational innovations of Free/Open Source Software, its attractiveness diminished. While still there are many enthusiasts of Free/Open Source Software and thousands of small and medium-sized projects grow steadily, the larger ones are less and less likely to happen.

As a result, the chances of new, complex projects, such as Linux or Open Office in the past, are getting slimmer and slimmer. Decades of lack of institutional support from governments and general neglect have possibly resulted in Free/Open Source movement missing the window of opportunity to revolutionize software.

More information:
Chełkowski T, Jemielniak D, Macikowski K (2021) Free and Open Source Software organizations: A large-scale analysis of code, comments, and commits frequency. PLOS ONE 16(9): e0257192. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257192

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti … journal.pone.0257192

Dariusz Jemielniak, djemielniak@cyber.harvard.edu

Provided by Harvard University