Abstract:

Open source development success could be attributed to some key characteristics. Open source developments are usually viewed as un-conventional software engineering approach to software development. This article presents a unique framework to open source development with open-onions approach that identifies key- characteristics of successful open source projects. Validation was performed based on ten highly ranked1 Open source projects. Data was collected from sourceforge.net repository and analysed with SPSS. Our approach is based on five fundamental open onions layers. Result shows that the most popular open source license is GPL and that licence type has significant impact on project rank. The domain audience has negative impact on project rank and user interface has significantly negative impact on project’s domain audience. Topics covered have strong significant impact on the domain audience and a negative effect on the user interface. This study revealed that given the open onions approach, open source development could be visualized more conventionally.