The Third Bit

Open Source Immigration

This Computer Weekly piece pointed me at a project that’s studying immigration into open source projects. Interesting stuff: the curves are similar to the naked eye, so my next two questions would be:

1. What factors account for the differences between projects?
2. What do the curves look like when you divide the population by first language, geographic location, gender, age, etc.?

See also Susan Sim’s paper on software immigrants: these concerns aren’t traditionally part of software engineering, but I believe they have as much influence on success or failure as technology choices or modeling tools (probably more).