Network Analysis of a Large Scale Open Source Project

One way to understand the structure of an open source community is by applying network analysis to its source code repositories. In this paper a new method for the analysis of committers' networks is proposed. The method deals with directed and weighted committers' networks. The method is then applied to the Android open source project. The analysis results show how a large, company sponsored, and industry backed open source project, i.e. an open source project with the majority of the community members affiliated with the industry, is structured. In particular, it shows that the involvement of an entire industry eco system within a company sponsored open source project does not imply more equal distribution of the participating community members' influences in terms of committers' networks.