I look for a top list of open source projects. By top list I mean those being
the most popular, having most users, having most developers contributing.

I need to know about both completely open source stuff (like GNU Linux kernel,
Apache) and open source projects provided and governed by some company (like
http://Mozilla.org which is governed by Netscape, or http://OpenOffice.org
which is governed by Sun). For each I would like to get links to about 9-14
projects. Also, I'd like to know why they should be the biggest.

I need to cover different areas (so that I do not want to get a list of
projects just from one company; I will be interested in different opensource
infrastractures in terms of whether they use http://SourceForge.net
installation or something else, or what bug tracking, control versioning,
mailing lists, etc. being used by various projects).

Thanks in advance.

---

Request for Question Clarification by maniac-ga on 27 Apr 2003 19:48 PDT

Hello Edie99,

Due to the nature of Open Source, it may be difficult to provide an
accurate estimate of users or contributing developers. For example, a
project such as XFree86 has perhaps several thousand people who have
contributed over the last 20 years - but about 100 maintain it now.
How do you want it sized based on developer count? Another example
would be KDE and GNOME - both are included in many distributions, yet
each user primarily uses only one. The data for number of "real users"
may not exist.

It may be possible to use a size metric instead such as "Lines of
Code" instead to determine the "biggest" Open Source projects. For
example,
  http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/
has the following rankings for the items included in Red Hat 7.3:
 - the Linux kernel
 - Mozilla
 - the X window system
 - gcc (compiler)
 - gdb (debugger)
 - "binary tools" (bintools?)
 - emacs (text editor / develoment environment)
 - LAPACK (numeric algebra library)
 - the Gimp (image manipulation)
 - MySQL (database)
and note that KDE and GNOME are *not* listed because they are
developed and distributed as a number of smaller components. Would an
answer with this kind of information (along with the on line
references) satisfy your needs?

  --Maniac

---

Clarification of Question by edie99-ga on 28 Apr 2003 11:16 PDT

Hi Maniac,

These are very good questions.

I need those projects having most developers contributing as those
having small amount of contributing developers don't have large (or
any) opensource infrastracture (in terms of http://SourceForge and the
like). And I need those who have most developers contributing in the
last two years or so, not over 20 years. Data don't have to be exact
but should give me some idea about big communities.

BTW MySQL is a huge project, but it doesn't apply as they don't have a
contributing community (developers) AFAIK.

As this gets more complicated, I slightly increase the price.

Hello edie99-ga!
     Here is a list (in no particular order) of the “biggest”
verifiable Open Source Projects.
I have compiled this list using your criteria of “the most popular,
having the most users and the most developers contributing”
     For each project I have included links that cite why that project
would be considered one of the biggest, as well as the way the project
works (it’s infrastructure) such as bug tracking, control version,
mailing lists and forums. There are also multiple projects for each
(note: some links contain several projects)

If you have any questions about the information I have provided,
please request a clarification and allow me some time to respond
before rating my answer.
Thanks so much for your question and best of luck to you!
chellphill-ga


1.APACHE
 http://www.apache.org

Reasons, quotes, or sources that point to this as being one of the
biggest OS projects:

http://bulunga.dat.escet.urjc.es/apache-cvs/
CVS Analysis for the Apache project

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~paulmay/projects/opensource.pdf
"For example, the Apache web server, one of the largest open source
projects currently underway, has a core group of only 20 programmers,
and the server they maintain has a market share of over 50%."
	
http://www.apache.org/foundation/members.html
List of members belonging to the Apache Software Foundation

http://www.apache.org/dev/
Developer resources

http://apache.meetup.com/links/
Meet up place for Apache developers

http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200304/index.html
Web Server Survey 
(Shows as of April 2003, 64.82% of web servers in this survey were
using Apache.

http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/200304/servers.html shows a
breakdown by version)

Infrastructure:

http://www.apache.org/foundation/cvs.html
"Our developers are located all around the world. To enable them to
work together on our software, we keep the source code in an
Internet-accessible revision control system called CVS. Apache
committers have
write access to the CVS repositories, enabling them to make changes to
the source code. Everyone has read access to the repositories, so you
may download the most up-to-date development version of the software."

http://www.cvshome.org/
Concurrent Versions System

http://www.apache.org/foundation/mailinglists.html
Apache mailing lists

http://httpd.apache.org/bug_report.html
Bug reporting

http://httpd.apache.org/security_report.html
Security reporting

http://p.webring.com/hub?ring=apachesupport&hub
Apache webring

Projects:

http://www.apache.org/foundation/projects.html
A list of Apache Software Foundation projects

http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Apache-Overview-HOWTO-3.html & 
http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Apache-Overview-HOWTO.html
Linux Documentation Project Apache overview

http://www.rkbloom.net/ap_projects.html
More projects

http://www.apache.org/foundation/members-projects.html
List of members projects they are working on.

http://www.apache.org/~jim/committers.html#cvs-committers
A list of all committers (including members) and their projects/CVS
trees is also available.

http://incubator.apache.org/
“an entry path to the Apache Software Foundation for projects and
codebases wishing to become part of the Foundation's efforts. Code
donations from external organisations and existing external projects
wishing to move to Apache will enter through the Incubator.”

http://www.joshie.com/projects/apache-frontpage/
Apache frontpage

http://www.php.net


2.XFREE86
 http://www.xfree86.org

Reasons, quotes, or sources that point to this as being one of the
biggest OS projects:
http://bulunga.dat.escet.urjc.es/xfree86-cvs/index.php?menu=Statistics
CVS Analysis for the XFree86 project

http://www.xfree86.org/coreteam.html
Core Team

Infrastructure:
http://www.xfree86.org/cvs/
The XFree86 CVS Repository

http://bugs.xfree86.org/
Bug reporting

http://www.xfree86.org/lists.html
"The devel@XFree86.org  list is the best list to use for most XFree86
development issues. The only exceptions are issues specific to fonts,
which should be discussed at fonts@XFree86.org, and issues specific to
internationalisation, which should be discussed at i18n@XFree86.org."

http://www.xfree86.org/developer.html
The XFree86™ Development Model

Projects:

http://www.cygwin.com/xfree/
"Cygwin/XFree86 is a port of XFree86 to the Microsoft Windows family
of operating systems. Cygwin/XFree86 runs on all recent consumer and
business versions of Windows; as of 2002-05-12 those versions are
specifically Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0,
Windows 2000, and Windows XP."
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/xoncygwin)

http://www.mrcla.com/XonX/
XFree86 on Darwin and Mac OS X
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/xonx/)

http://freshmeat.net/projects/xfree86/?topic_id=55

http://freshmeat.net/projects/wacomdriverforxfree86/?topic_id=146
XFree86 XInput driver for Wacom tablets

http://cvs.arabeyes.org/cvsweb/projects/external/xkb/xfree86
CVS log for projects/external/xkb/xfree86


3. MOZILLA
http://www.mozilla.org

Reasons, quotes, or sources that point to this as being one of the
biggest OS projects:
http://bulunga.dat.escet.urjc.es/mozilla-cvs/
CVS Analysis for the Mozilla project

www.svifsi.ch/revue/pages/issues/n016/in016Heras.pdf 
" It is currently still one of the largest open source projects to be
financed by a company."

http://www.mozilla.org/owners.html
Module owners (“An Owner is responsible for fielding bug reports,
enhancement requests, patch submissions, and so on“)

http://www.mozilla.org/about/stafflist.html#Staff-Members
Staff Members

http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/reviewers.html
List of reviewers

http://webtools.mozilla.org/miscstats/
Some statistics that attempt to measure mozilla contributions.

http://mothra.mozilla.org/webtools/miscstats/
Bugzilla stats

Infrastructure:

http://eu.mozdev.org/
European Mozilla Developers

http://www.mozilla.org/community.html
Mailing lists and forums 

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided
Bug reporting

Projects:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/
Mozilla.org list of ongoing projects

http://www.mozilla.org/catalog/oprojects/
Other projects

http://wp.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/ns7/relnotes/7.html
Netscape 7

http://www.mozilla.org/docs/ora-oss2001/state-of-mozilla/04_Out_and_About_8.html
List of Mozilla projects and components.

http://bugzilla.org/
Bugzilla bug tracking system

http://www.mozdev.org/
“more than 100 active projects hosted on the site”

http://segment7.net/mozilla/mozilla.html

http://www.clubi.ie/kings/brian/moz/projects.html

http://mozilla.weebeastie.net/
Lists some Project Sites (Themes, Toolbars, Plugins, etc...)

http://freshmeat.net/projects/mozilla/?topic_id=91%2C31%2C39%2C810%2C24

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/mozilla.htm
Mozilla ActiveX project

http://ospkibook.sourceforge.net/docs/OSPKI-2.4.6/OSPKI/impl-mozilla.htm
Mozilla Open Source PKI projects

4. GNOME
http://www.gnome.org


Reasons, quotes, or sources that point to this as being one of the
biggest OS projects:
http://bulunga.dat.escet.urjc.es/gnome-cvs/ &
http://bulunga.dat.escet.urjc.es/gnome/
CVS Analysis for the GNOME project

http://wwwai.wu-wien.ac.at/~koch/forschung/sw-eng/wp22.pdf
    "Abstract-This paper presents first results from research into  
open source projects from a software engineering perspective.      
The research methodology employed relies on public data             
retrieved from the CVS-repository of the GNOME project and          
relevant discussion groups. This methodology is described in
detail  and   some    of  the  results  concerning   the  special
characteristics of open source software development are given."

http://mail.conecta.it/pipermail/freesw/2000-October/000514.html
"This is probably the single biggest Open Source Project. At the time
he had under
300 people who had access to and could modify the source code."

http://www.gnome.org/faqs/gnome-foundation-faq/
FAQ about the Gnome foundation

http://www.gnome.org/developers/
Developers by region

http://www.gnome.org/commsupp.html
Gnome Distributors

Infrastructure: 

http://developer.gnome.org/documents/joining-gnome/gettingstarted.html
Mailing lists, irc ect.

http://developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html
revision control system

http://developer.gnome.org/tools/repo/
Widget Repository

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/
Bug tracking

http://gnomesupport.org/
Gnome support website



Projects:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/list

http://www.gnome.org/projects/
alphabetical list of projects

http://www.gnome-db.org/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnome-linuxconf/

http://www.paw.co.za/projects/gnome-alsamixer/

http://freshmeat.net/projects/libxslt/?topic_id=58%2C809%2C912%2C853%2C867

http://www.bengalinux.org/projects/gnome/

http://jodrell.net/projects/gnome-crontab

http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=Gnome-i18n
“This project aims to have a full translation for the Gnome interface
by translating messages in certain files to Arabic”



5. KDE
http://www.kde.org

Reasons, quotes, or sources that point to this as being one of the
biggest OS projects:
http://bulunga.dat.escet.urjc.es/kde-cvs/ &
http://bulunga.dat.escet.urjc.es/kde/
CVS Analysis for the KDE project

http://www.vasoftware.com/news/press.php/2000/22.html
"As the KDE Project has grown to be one of the largest Open Source
projects in the world, we have found ourselves constantly overloading
our server resources," said KDE Developer/Evangelist Kurt Granroth

http://www.trolltech.com/newsroom/announcements/00000043.html
 "The K Desktop Environment (KDE), one of the largest open source
projects based on voluntary work from all over the world..."

http://www.trolltech.com/company/bios.html
"Since then, KDE today has become one of the largest open source
projects ever, with hundreds of active contributors and translations
into over 70 languages."

http://www.kde.org/areas/people/
The people behind KDE

http://www.kde.org/people/credits.php
“This page is an insufficient attempt to acknowledge those who
contributed to KDE. Please allow us to extend our most cordial thanks
to all of you. We realize that the people acknowledged on this page
are only a small percentage of those who actually contributed to KDE.”

http://www.kde.org/people/gallery.php
Pictures of some of the KDE developers

http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/project.php#factsandfigures
KDE Facts and Figures

http://www.kdeleague.org/
“The KDE League is a group of industry leaders and KDE developers
focused on facilitating the promotion, distribution, and development
of KDE.”

Infrastructure:
http://www.kde.org/mailinglists/
Mailing lists

http://www.kde.org/helping/
“KDE is a very large project and depends on people volunteering time,
code, money, and energy to keep it going. This page tries to create a
match between your interests and where you can go to help out KDE
using that interest. “

http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/
KDE CVS Repository

http://developer.kde.org/joining/index.html
development mailing lists

http://www.kde.org/family/
KDE family websites

http://www.kde.org/international/
List of KDE international pages

http://bugs.kde.org/
Bug reporting


Projects:
http://apps.kde.com/rf/2/latest?sid=246cf47fdae7b46e02d58dd3540d2259
http://usability.kde.org/
http://accessibility.kde.org/
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/segfaultskde/
http://segfaultskde.berlios.de/index.php?content=oooqs
http://sourceforge.net/projects/scofmb/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/kde/
http://technomidi.com/kde/
http://www.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=KDE-i18n
http://www.kdevelop.org/
http://edu.kde.org/
http://www.kde.org/areas/multimedia/


6. OPENOFFICE.ORG
http://www.openoffice.org

Reasons, quotes, or sources that point to this as being one of the
biggest OS projects:
http://bulunga.dat.escet.urjc.es/openoffice-cvs/
CVS Analysis for the OpenOffice.org project

http://www.openoffice.org/editorial/ec23July.html
"OpenOffice.org is and remains one of the largest Open Source
projects. But its importance does not only lie in the often-touted
size of its code base. Rather, it lies in the fact that OpenOffice.org
has proven, by its continuing and growing success, the feasibility of
corporate-sponsored projects, and the real possibility that the most
effective model for large-scale software creation and popularization
is that provided by Open Source. "
"And, as our most recent statistics indicate, we are succeeding.
(Weekly statistics are posted on the homepage.) Over 3000 subscribers
to our lists; nearly 32,000 source and binary downloads in the last
week alone (not even counting those of the most recent build), with
almost 350,000 so far; and an active and growing base of project leads
overseeing new, community-organized projects such as the Documentation
and
Groupware, to name but two. "

http://www.openoffice.org/white_papers/tech_overview/tech_overview.html
" Building the OpenOffice.org sources is not a task to be taken
lightly. It may turn out to be the largest open source project ever in
terms of source size and time to build. The source and build
environment size is in the region of 500MB and consists of
approximately 40,000 files. It can take up to 18 hours to fully build
from scratch, but this is rarely needed. The build environment is
prepared to allow working with milestone builds. "

http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/3841/2/
"The source code, written in C++, is now a part of one of the largest
open source projects ever conceived. The work has been divided into
several teams, with each team's manager guiding the direction of newly
submitted code."

http://marketing.openoffice.org/
"OpenOffice.org is the biggest open source project in the world with
over 7.5 million lines of code and hundreds of programmers and
volunteers working all over the globe."

http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/surveyreport.pdf
Openoffice.org survey review



Infrastructure: 
http://website.openoffice.org/developer/
OpenOffice.org for Developers

http://www.openoffice.org/mail_list.html
Mailing lists

http://www.openoffice.org/project_issues.html
Bug reporting

Projects:
http://projects.openoffice.org/
http://projects.openoffice.org/index.html
http://incubator.openoffice.org/
http://projects.imp.ch/openoffice/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/openoffice/?topic_id=129%2C131
http://sourceforge.net/projects/oo-cs/
http://www.openoffice.ca/projects
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/



7. LINUX KERNEL
http://www.kernel.org/
Reasons, quotes, or sources that point to this as being one of the
biggest OS projects:

http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2000/press_isp.html
“International Data Corp. (IDC) research states that paid Linux
shipments grew faster than any other server operating system over the
past two years. IDC preliminary figures for 1999 show Linux shipments
hold 24.6 percent of the server operating system market, up from 15.8
in 1998. IDC research also shows 40 percent of all spending on Linux
servers is for Internet-related applications, making Linux servers
firmly embedded in the Internet infrastructure. Research firm
NetCraft, Inc. (www.netcraft.com), states that 29 percent of all
public Web servers also run on Linux, making Linux the most popular
operating system for public Web sites.”

Infrastructure:
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=429
Mailing lists

http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=429
User-mode Linux kernel port: CVS

http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/
The User-mode Linux Kernel Home Page

http://jungla.dit.upm.es/~jmseyas/linux/kernel/hackers-docs.html
“Index of Documentation for People Interested in Writing and/or
Understanding the Linux Kernel.”

http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/lk/lk.html
The Linux kernel

http://mirrors.kernel.org/

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/reporting-bugs.html
Reporting bugs

http://bugzilla.kernel.org/
This is the Kernel Tracker system(based on Bugzilla) for posting bugs
against the 2.5 Linux kernel

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/
Mailing lists

Projects:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/kbuild/
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~nutt/kpfl.html
http://l4hq.org/projects/kernel/
http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/GNU/tasks_5.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/user-mode-linux
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wolk
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lksctp
http://freshmeat.net/projects/linux/?topic_id=143
http://www.kernelnewbies.org/projects/
http://www.nongnu.org/lkdp/
http://www.linux-mm.org/
http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net/ (A project to produce an open book
documenting the kernel.)
http://linuxkernel.foundries.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kernel-janitor
http://playstation2-linux.com/projects/xrhino-kernel/
http://rsync.samba.org/


Other Notable Open Source projects:

BIND
 http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/
SENDMAIL
http://www.sendmail.org/
GNU
http://www.gnu.org
GIMP 
http://www.gimp.org

Other interesting links:
http://opensource.ucc.ie/icse2003/3rd-WS-on-OSS-Engineering.pdf
http://tomi.freeweb.supereva.it/lyx/lyxsurvey/node30.html?p 
http://www.sunsource.net/
http://www.opensource.org
http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/
http://www.freestandards.org/
http://www.oss-institute.org/