Antecedents of Different Social Network Structures on Open Source Projects Popularity

As Open source software (OSS) phenomenon become popular, it attracts millions of developers and plays a key role in success of small and large businesses. However, OSS ecosystem is very competitive and so only a few OSS projects, among millions hosted on social coding platforms such as GitHub, become successful. Since popular projects attract more developers, a key success ingredient, this research examines the antecedents of popularity of OSS projects hosted on a social coding platform. We have investigated the effect of the social structure of an OSS project on project popularity among community members. Data from GitHub is used to construct two different types of social networks for each project. The affiliation network represents the developers’ inter-project relationships and following network reveals intra-project relationship. Applying the lenses of social network theory, we examine the effect of embeddedness and cohesion of the project’s contributors on project popularity. Our results show that both affiliation and following networks are different in how they evolve and affect project popularity. Our findings can help OSS project leaders to understand developers’ interactions and its effect on popularity of the project.