Hi Guilherme, As the language creator and owner, Rich is obviously a critical part of the team that directs and maintains Clojure and if he was no longer involved there would be a significant impact. That said, Clojure is backed by a company (Cognitect) and a community of 10k's of developers and there are many people intimately familiar with both the codebase and the language. Being backed by a company mitigates a significant amount of risk.
As to your actual study, I don't know that I agree with your methodology or conclusions. Over long lifetimes, open source projects often go through a series of primary maintainers and key contributors do not always have the same footprint as the initial developers (just as a matter of how code grows). I also don't think you can truly run "experiments" on something like this without taking a large open-source project with a large community and actually removing key developers to see what would happen. My expectation is that there would obviously be an impact in direction and velocity of development but that the project would survive just fine if the community is large enough. Alex On Friday, August 7, 2015 at 11:21:40 AM UTC-5, Guilherme Avelino wrote: > > As part of my PhD research on code authorship, we calculated the Truck > Factor (TF) of some popular GitHub repositories. > > As you probably know, the Truck (or Bus) Factor designates the minimal > number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a > project is incapacitated. In our work, we consider that a system is in > trouble if more than 50% of its files become orphan (i.e., without a main > author). > > More details on our work in this preprint: > https://peerj.com/preprints/1233 > > We calculated the TF for *Clojure* and obtained a value of *2*. > > The developers responsible for this TF are: > > Rich Hickey - author of 58% of the files > Stuart Halloway - author of 27% of the files > > To validate our results, we would like to ask *Clojure* developers the > following three brief questions: > > (a) Do you agree that the listed developers are the main developers of > *Clojure*? > > (b) Do you agree that *Clojure* will be in trouble if the listed > developers leave the project (e.g., if they win in the lottery, to be less > morbid)? > > (c) Does *Clojure* have some characteristics that would attenuate the > loss of the listed developers (e.g., detailed documentation)? > > Thanks in advance for your collaboration, > > Guilherme Avelino > PhD Student > Applied Software Engineering Group (ASERG) > UFMG, Brazil > http://aserg.labsoft.dcc.ufmg.br/ > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
