Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

Posted Jan 28, 2024 15:02 UTC (Sun) by gioele (subscriber, #61675)
In reply to: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system by khim
Parent article: Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system

> > All other things being equal, having paid attention to the success or otherwise of projects for about 30 years
>
> Wow. Where may I find your study? How have you picked the projects, where is the list, what was the outcomes you recorded?

There are some numbers in:

Jonas Gamalielsson and Björn Lundell. 2017. On licensing and other conditions for contributing to widely used open source projects: an exploratory analysis. In Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym '17). ACM.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3125433.3125456

Table 8 seems to hint at the fact that projects with CLAs and similar contributor agreements tend to be more successful (according to BlackDuck's metric =~ being used) than projects without CLA. Correlation is not causation. This success could be due to having an entity (business, foundation) paying the programmers in charge of the project, rather than due to the CLA itself.

That study did not investigate the effect of CLAs on the number and variety of contributors to a project. So perhaps projects with CLAs are widely used, but not frequently contributed to (and the minute the sponsor goes away the project is dead, regardless of its widespread usage). But asserting that would require another study.