Factors Contributing to the Success of Open Source (Part 3 of 3)

In Part 1 I described the background and in Part 2 I explored the results of a recent study regarding factors contributing to the success of open source projects.

We saw that a number of factors showed a strong correlation to the success of open source including type of project, experience of the developers, number of developers and target audience of the project.

Interestingly, when only the subset of projects in "production" is considered -- virtually all the correlations disappear. In other words, when and if a project makes it to production, there is virtually no correlation between the factors and success. The only factor that has any correlation is the type of project (applications versus tools), and the correlation only with number of releases, there is none to number of downloads.

So once an open source project manages to go into production, it's success is not related to the developers, language, license or type. Once in production, success seems to be linked to factors not related to the semantics of the project and probably related to things like quality, relevance and value.

- Don