The tour through the comparison between Debian and SourceForge comes to a close by questioning whether Debian acts as a catalyst to evolutionary activity when a project is inserted into the repository. It has already been strongly suggested that projects packaged in Debian are recipients of significantly greater rates of activity.

Of the 50 projects in the Debian sample, 22 of them had a known history of evolutionary activity (monthly averages of number of developers and number of commits) that pre-dated its insertion into Debian, providing us with a “before” and “after”. So we compared the before and after of each project.

Developers

In 18 out of 22 projects, the distinct number of developers increases after being added to Debian. The remaining 4 experience no change, and have only 1 or 2 known contributors.

Commits

All projects have a greater number of commits in the after period than in the before period. However, the rate of commits in each period (the total commits within that period divided by its duration) only increases for 10 of the 22.

Summary

In summary of this trilogy I can say, from an absolute standpoint, that our results suggest Debian projects tend to be older, larger, attract more developers and a greater amount of activity, and all to a very significant degree. Furthermore, from an evolutionary perspective, the “Debian effect” seems to cause the pool of developers contributing to a project to increase when it is packaged by Debian, along with a half-decent chance that activity increases also.