Roadmap: Measuring open source software

Abstract

Software for which source code is public and can be freely copied, shared and modified is called "open source software" (OSS).See the Open Source Initiative for a more comprehensive definition of open source software, https://opensource.org/osd-annotated. It is often co-authored using online version control repositories such as GitHub, and may also be bundled into a "package" and uploaded to a "package manager" platform, to be downloaded and re-used by others. There is an incentive to make code as abstract and re-useable as possible, be it within a single program, an organisation or even worldwide as it is inefficient to rewrite code repeatedly (Hunt and Thomas, 1999).