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Title: Novelty Begets Popularity, But Curbs Participation - A Macroscopic View of the Python Open-Source Ecosystem
Who creates the most innovative open-source software projects? And what fate do these projects tend to have? Building on a long history of research to understand innovation in business and other domains, as well as recent advances towards modeling innovation in scientific research from the science of science field, in this paper we adopt the analogy of innovation as emerging from the novel recombination of existing bits of knowledge. As such, we consider as innovative the software projects that recombine existing software libraries in novel ways, i.e., those built on top of atypical combinations of packages as extracted from import statements. We then report on a large-scale quantitative study of innovation in the Python open-source software ecosystem. Our results show that higher levels of innovativeness are statistically associated with higher GitHub star counts, i.e., novelty begets popularity. At the same time, we find that controlling for project size, the more innovative projects tend to involve smaller teams of contributors, as well as be at higher risk of becoming abandoned in the long term. We conclude that innovation and open source sustainability are closely related and, to some extent, antagonistic.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2120323 1901311 2107298
PAR ID:
10552525
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM
Date Published:
ISBN:
9798400702174
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 11
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Lisbon Portugal
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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