Innovation Diffusion in Open Source Software: preliminary analysis of dependency changes in the gentoo portage package database

摘要

In this paper we make the case that software dependencies are a form of innovation adoption. We then test this on the time-evolution of the Gentoo package dependency graph. We find that the Bass model of innovation di usion ts the growth of the number of packages depending on a given library. Interestingly, we also nd that low-level packages have a primarily imitation driven adoption and multimedia libraries have primarily innovation driven growth