A Study on Characteristics of Open Source Software Development Projects in the Areas of Engineering and Games

摘要

This paper investigates characteristics of Open Source Software (OSS) development projects based on the number of participants and their roles and activities in the areas of Games and Science/Engineering. We utilized Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and clustering over the data from SourceForge.net, and the features that we considered and analyzed for this study include number of users, number of developers, number of message postings, number of file releases, and project subcategories. For the categories of Games and Engineering, the three most active subcategories within each were identified, and the result indicates that most of the Games and Engineering projects have similar characteristics in terms of the selected features and are small with about five users. The result also shows that a group of Engineering projects seem highly specialized and require more subject knowledge in executing the projects than other Games projects.