Hello Again, Below are the details for a new submission. Thanks to the authors for the submission. As always, authors welcome feedback for the papers. Authors: Kieran Healy and Alan Schussman. Title: The Ecology of Open Source Software Development http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/healyschussman.pdf Abstract: A number of theories have emerged to explain the success of open source software, mainly from economics and law. We analyze a very large sample of OSS projects and find striking patterns in the overall structure of the development community. The distribution of projects on a range of activity measures is spectacularly skewed, with only a relatively tiny number of projects showing evidence of the strong collaborative activity which is supposed to characterize OSS. Our findings are consistent with prior, smaller-scale empirical research. We argue that these findings pose problems for the dominant accounts of OSS. We suggest that the gulf between active and inactive projects may be explained by social-structural features of the community which have received little attention in the existing literature. We suggest some hypotheses that might better predict the observed ecology of projects. Thanks again! -- =============================================== Karim R. Lakhani MIT Sloan School of Management MIT Free/Open Source Software Research Project e-mail: lakhani@mit.edu voice: 617-851-1224 fax: 617-344-0403 http://opensource.mit.edu http://freesoftware.mit.edu http://mit.edu/lakhani/www ==============================================