The talk will present a quantitative analysis of the projects producing the main free, open source software cloud platforms: OpenStack, Apache CloudStack, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus. The analysis will focus on the communities behind those projects, their main development parameters, and the trends that can be observed.
Understanding the inner life of free / open source software projects is of fundamental importance to developers, users and decision makers. This talk will help to understand what's happening behind the curtains in the most relevant open cloud platforms, by analyzing the rich data obtained from their developing repositories.
The talk will cover, for the four analyzed projects, the following topics:
- How open is their development model, and to which extent they provide access to their development data.
- Some parameters related to the overall activity and effort put into the development and maintenance of their products.
- The main characteristics of their development community: size, diversity, engagement, attraction, etc.
- The main parameters characterizing their performance, such as time-to-fix tickets or time-to-review patches.
- Some visualizations of the most relevant aspects.
All the tools used to produce the analysis presented in this talk are free, open source software, based on the Grimoire technology, http://vizgrimoire.github.io. The talk will also provide some hints on how to reproduce the study, on these or other projects.
Illustrative example of the kind of information that will be presented: OpenStack Grimoire Dashboard, http://activity.openstack.org/dash
This talk will be an update and extension of the one I delivered in the Open Cloud Day, at OSCON 2014, http://bit.ly/oscon-opencloud
