[swift-evolution] Studying the evolution of the Swift project

[Gustavo Henrique Lima Pinto]

Hi there,

I'm a researcher studying software evolution. As part of my current
research, I'm studying the implications of open-sourcing a proprietary
software, for instance, if the project succeed in attracting newcomers.
Swift was in my list.

To further analyze the impacts of Swift’s migration, we analyzed the git
log commit history of your project in terms of _number of contributions_,
_number of newcomers_, and _number of contributors per month_. The
following figure presents a temporal perspective regarding these three
measures.
[image: Inline image 1]
Given the numbers presented in the graphic, we would like to ask Swift
developers the following questions:

1. What motivated the project to open its source code at Github? How do you
evaluate the benefits of this migration?
2. Does this snapshot make sense? Did you find any inconsistency on the
data?
3. Do you have any internal policy to promote/attract/retain newcomers? If
so, do them succeed?
4. Did you expect a high number of newcomers joining the project right
after it became open-source?
5. Although several developers that joined the project placed their very
first contribution in a very short amount of time, most of them did not
keep contributing in the following days. Why do you believe this happens?

Thanks in advance for your collaboration,

Gustavo Pinto, PhD
http://www.gustavopinto.org
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