ReadWriteWeb’s Joe Brockmeier has an interesting piece analyzing OpenStack Essex, while this isn’t an exact overlap with the kind of analysis we’re working on for Insight and Nexus, it’s a view into the social and open source dynamics of a project.
Brockmeier’s article is a summary of some analysis that OpenStack contributor Mark McLoughlin assembled from commits and Gerrit code reviews. It’s a breakdown of activity by organization, as with many open source projects that have corporate involvement, there’s always one or two companies that tend to dominate the commit breakdown.
Where the article is a little off-base is in the assessment of community health, you can’t judge the “health” of an open source project by the mix of companies represented in a commit breakdown alone. It’s an interesting statistic, but there’s so much more to open source than code commits including documentation efforts, marketing spend by companies invested in a project, and financial support for essential efforts not directly related to code (legal, infrastructure, etc.). Open source isn’t about code alone, and while it is an ideal for open source projects with corporate involvement to have balance, this balance can shift over time.