This may be a little bit of a hard one to pin down exactly, but does anyone know have statistics on what the average amount of time a typical open source developer spends on a project?. I've heard figures of 2 hours on a weekend. I'm talking about unpaid work here which developers do in their spare time.
Anyone know of any surveys that have been done ect?
Thanks!
The Technical University of Munich recently did a survey on the question of code reuse in open source software. You can find the resulting paper here. Interested participants (of which I was one) also received a presentation with the answer numbers broken down. Here's the relevant one:
Question: How many hours do you spend working on your current main project per week on average?
Total number of answers: 632
I can't make any statements as to the statistical validity, you'd have to dig through the paper for that, I guess.
I'd assume the answer must be something like a couple of hours in a live time.
Most contributors to open source projects submit only a single patch or fix, but since there are so many of them they
a) add a lot to the projects
b) drag down the average
Even when you only count the developers with submit privilege on the version control system, the result probably isn't much different. Just look at the thousands of projects at source forge that never result in any substantial result.