Open-Source Software Development Communities: An Analysis Approach as a Social Network

Open-source software plays a very important role in today’s technological world. Developer communities are sharing solutions and exposing their work through large organizations like GitHub. Based on the above, an interesting question arises: “Do the developer communities behave in a similar way regardless of the language they work with?” and following “which programming languages favor forking the most?”. In an effort to answer questions, data from twenty different communities of programming languages were collected, as they emerged through GitHub. From the data (43,704,340 nodes and 39,038,833 connections) twenty different social networks were formed which were studied with simple tools of statistics and network theory. The results showed that all communities behaved in a similar way to the exclusion of the R programming language community.