Open source software is a lot like education: everybody wants it to be successful, but there's no definition of what counts as success, and traditional definitions ('sales', 'grades') are wholly inadequate. This paper in the most recent First Monday looks at what constitutes success in OSS, and comes up with a taxonomy of six dimensions and a list of five success metrics:
- user interest - traffic on the site, downloads, number of developers, etc.
- project activity - number of releases, patches, source code lines, etc.
- project effectiveness - task completion (bug fix, feature request, and support request)
- project efficiency - measure of inputs (eg. developers) to output (downloads, development, etc)
- code quality - understandability, consistency, maintainability, etc.
- user interest - traffic on the site, downloads, number of developers, etc.
- project activity - number of releases, patches, source code lines, etc.
- project effectiveness - task completion (bug fix, feature request, and support request)
- project efficiency - measure of inputs (eg. developers) to output (downloads, development, etc)
- code quality - understandability, consistency, maintainability, etc.
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