Why FLOSSMetrics?

In recent years, libre software has developed as a novel form of collaborative production. Since its origin as a collaboration between individual volunteers, it has seen tremendous success, both in terms of the commercial and technical strengths of the produced software itself, but also as a model of organisation and development: open source software is arguably one of the best examples of open, distributed models for production and development that exists today. What is more important, from the point of view of the classical approaches to development methodologies by groups of professionals (and specifically from the point of view of the classical concepts of software engineering), the models used in libre software development are innovative in several ways, to the point that they are only recognized as valid models at all since they have actually produced mature and stable software: any previous “theoreticall” analysis would have probably concluded that libre software development was not capable of producing any sustained, useful output.

In this context, FLOSSMETRICS will analyze in depth, from a quantitative point of view, a large number of projects, using mainly publicly available data sources. This analysis will help to better understand the landscape of libre software development, and to obtain factual data about it which can be used to improve libre software development itself (be it done in volunteer or corporate contexts), and to identify interesting practices that could be used in other contexts, but also to obtain indicators and data useful for companies willing to use libre software, or for public administrations intertested in its promotion or adoption. In addition, a huge database with quantitative data about thousands of libre software projects will be made available for the use of other research groups, what hopefully will act as a motivator to increase the empirical research on libre software development (and on software development in general).