Biological Mutualistic Models Applied to Study Open Source Software Development

The evolution of the Web has allowed the generation of several platforms for collaborative work. One of the main contributors to these advances is the Open Source initiative, in which projects are boosted to a new level of interaction and cooperation that improves their software quality and reliability. In order to understand how the group of contributors interacts with the software under development, we propose a novel methodology that adapts Lotka-Volterra-based biological models used for host-parasite interaction. In that sense, we used the concept mutualism from social parasites. Preliminary results based on experiments on the Github collaborative platform showed that Open Source phenomena can be modeled as a mutualistic system, in terms of the evolution of the population of developers and repositories.