Geographic location of developers at SourceForge
Geographic location of developers at SourceForge
复制标题
SourceForge 开发人员的地理位置
DOI：
10.1145/1137983.1138017
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发表时间：
2006
影响因子：
9.5
通讯作者：
Jesus M. Gonzalez
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
G. Robles;Jesus M. Gonzalez
自由（免费/开源）软件的开发通常由地理上分散的团队执行。大多数情况下，参与是自愿的，有时是零星的，而且往往不受预先定义的管理结构的限制。这意味着任何人都可以做出贡献，而且原则上，除了互联网连接和语言的可用性和质量方面的差异之外，没有哪个国籍比其他国籍具有优势。然而，不同地区的参与程度确实存在差异，尽管这方面的研究很少。在本文中，我们提供了一些数据，可以作为其中一些研究的基础。我们获取了在最大的自由软件开发网络平台 SourceForge 上注册的用户数据库，并推断出他们的地理位置。为此，我们对可用数据（主要是电子邮件地址和时区）应用了多种技术和启发式方法，并对其进行了详细介绍和讨论。结果显示了 SourceForge 用户的区域分布快照，这可能很好地代表了 libre 软件开发人员的实际分布。此外，当可用数据相似时（如与软件项目相关的邮件列表的情况），该方法可能对其他领域的类似研究感兴趣。
The development of libre (free/open source) software is usually performed by geographically distributed teams. Participation in most cases is voluntary, sometimes sporadic, and often not framed by a pre-defined management structure. This means that anybody can contribute, and in principle no national origin has advantages over others, except for the differences in availability and quality of Internet connections and language. However, differences in participation across regions do exist, although there are little studies about them. In this paper we present some data which can be the basis for some of those studies. We have taken the database of users registered at SourceForge, the largest libre software development web-based platform, and have inferred their geographical locations. For this, we have applied several techniques and heuristics on the available data (mainly e-mail addresses and time zones), which are presented and discussed in detail. The results show a snapshot of the regional distribution of SourceForge users, which may be a good proxy of the actual distribution of libre software developers. In addition, the methodology may be of interest for similar studies in other domains, when the available data is similar (as is the case of mailing lists related to software projects).