A Novel Open Source Software Ecosystem: From a Graphic Point of View and Its Application

With the rapid development of open source software, various elements such as OSS, developers, users and online posts, across different communities and their interactions constitute a novel software ecosystem. Most of the current researches about software ecosystems care the connections between software, and few of them consider the relationship across communities from an overall perspective, and fail to cover the users and their activities which should be an indispensable part of the OSS ecosystem. This paper model the OSS ecosystem as a graph, which combines different types of OSS communities as a whole. Based on this graph model, we analyze the characteristics of ecosystem, like the evolution, competition and symbiosis. In addition, we build a recommendation system as well, and the experiment results suggest the validation of our approach. Keyword; open source ecosystem; graph model; recommendation algorithm