Empirical Tests of Zipf’s Law Mechanism in Open Source Linux Distribution

Maillart, Thomas; Sornette, Didier; Spaeth, Sebastian; Krogh, Georg von

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.101.218701

Cited by 91 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(38 reference statements)

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“…Their decisions to remove or add components are often based on the intensity of certain components' use in the community (Maillart et al, 2008). Any single organization is but one (possibly important) contributor to the community's project.…”

Section: Design and Relate: An Overview Of The Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Opening up design science: The challenge of designing for reuse and joint development

Krogh

Haefliger

2010

The Journal of Strategic Information Systems

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to advance design science by developing a framework for research on reuse and the relationship between external IT artifacts and their users. A design science approach to IS research needs to grapple with the fact that a number of relevant, economically attractive, external IT artifacts cannot be designed from scratch nor meaningfully evaluated based on the current state of development, and so design science research will struggle with incomplete cycles of design, relevance, and rigor. We suggest a strategic research agenda that integrates the design of the relationship between an external IT artifact and the user by considering the impact artifacts exert on users. Three dimensions derived from adaptive structuration theory inform our framework on three levels of design granularity (middle management, top management, and entrepreneur): agenda considers the dynamic properties of technological objects, adaptability refers to the functional affordance of external artifacts in development, and auspice captures the symbolic expression and scope for interpretation. We derive implications for research design.

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Section: Design and Relate: An Overview Of The Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Opening up design science: The challenge of designing for reuse and joint development

Krogh

Haefliger

2010

The Journal of Strategic Information Systems

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“…Usually, power-law, Zipfian distribution, FP, etc., are interpreted as the result of a stochastic growth process, with birth and death mechanism [4]. And, because of the clustering of high-rank values close to the x axis, values are sometimes grouped into buckets of exponentially increasing size in order to improve the accuracy of the regression [5].…”

Section: Parabolic Scaling Of Rank-size Distributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructal theory of parabolic scaling

Périn

2012

WIT Transactions on Ecology and the Environment

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The parabolic scaling of rank-size distributions is a very common phenomenon in natural or societal systems such as city sizes, petroleum reservoirs, or galactic intensities. Often, the divergence from a log-log linear power-law is explained by the finite size of the system studied. Several distribution functions were also proposed to best fit this kind of distribution, such as the parabolic fractal or the stretched exponential. In order to explain the emergence of this rank-size distribution pattern, we propose instead to consider a generic mechanism of constructal tree-shaped invasion of a territory combined with the constructal rank-size distribution of a growing flow architecture as the mechanism potentially generating a wide variety of parabolically scaling distributions. Simulations of this mechanism were conducted and we showed that it generated shorter and curved distribution tails similar to a parabolic scaling. In conclusion, we propose to consider the constructal law as the first principle behind the generation of parabolic scaling of rank-size distributions in natural, societal, and engineered systems.

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“…Free software projects (FSP) reflect the intention of a founder, the original owner of the property rights, to share costs of continuous software improvement, user base expansion, and visibility growth [13][14][15]. The ability to attract peers to co-create with the founder is understood as the attractiveness of the project [12].…”

Section: Introduction: Collective Production and Legal Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in free and open source software licenses: managerial interventions and variations on project attractiveness

Santos

2017

J Internet Serv Appl

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The license adopted by an open source software is associated with its success in terms of attractiveness and maintenance of an active ecosystem of users, bug reporters, developers, and sponsors because what can and cannot be done with the software and its derivatives in terms of improvement and market distribution depends on legal terms there specified. By knowing this licensing effect through scientific publications and their experience, project managers became able to act strategically, loosening up the restrictions associated with their source code due to sponsor interests, for example; or the contrary, tightening restrictions up to guarantee source code openness, adhering to the "forever free" strategy. But, have project managers behaved strategically like that, changing their projects license? Up to this paper, we did not know if and what types of changes in these legal allowances project managers have made and, more importantly, whether such managerial interventions are associated with variations in intervened project attractiveness (i.e., related to their numbers of web hits, downloads and members). This paper accomplishes these two goals and demonstrates that: 1) managers of free and open source software projects do change the distribution rights of their source code through a change in the (group of) license(s) adopted; and 2) variations in attractiveness are associated with the strategic choice of a licensing schema. To reach these conclusions, a unique dataset of open source projects that have changed license was assembled in a comparative form, analyzing intervened projects over its monthly periods of different licenses. Based on a sample of more than 3500 active projects over 44 months obtained from the FLOSSmole repository of Sourceforge.net data, 756 projects that had changed their source code distribution allowances and restrictions were identified and analyzed. A dataset on these projects' type of changes was assembled to enable a descriptive and exploratory analysis of the types of license interventions observed over a period of almost four years anchored on projects' attractiveness. More than 35 types of interventions were detected. The results indicate that variations in attractiveness after a license intervention are not symmetric; that is, if a change from license schema A to B is beneficial to attractiveness, a change from B to A is not necessarily prejudicial. This and other interesting findings are discussed in detail. In general, the results here reported support the current literature knowledge that the restrictions imposed by the license on the source code distribution are associated with market success vis-a-vis project attractiveness, but they also suggest that the state-of-the-science is superficial in terms of what is known about why these differences in attractiveness can be observed. The complexity of the results indicates to free software managers that no licensing schema should be seen as the right one, and its choice should be carefully made, considering project strat...

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Empirical Tests of Zipf’s Law Mechanism in Open Source Linux Distribution

Cited by 91 publications

References 26 publications

Opening up design science: The challenge of designing for reuse and joint development

Opening up design science: The challenge of designing for reuse and joint development

Constructal theory of parabolic scaling

Changes in free and open source software licenses: managerial interventions and variations on project attractiveness

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