Total Growth of Open Source Software

Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle, OSS researchers at SAP-Labs in Palo Alto, CA, have quantitatively analyzed the growth of more than 5,000 active and popular open source software projects and shows that the total project size (measured in source lines of code), the number of new open source projects, and the total number of open source projects are growing at an exponential rate. Previous research showed linear and quadratic growth in lines of source code of individual open source projects. This work shows that OSS is expanding at an exponential rate into new application areas.

You can find this groundbreaking research here.