The Bus Factor of Critical Open-Source Infrastructure

This repository contains a research paper analyzing the bus factor of critical open-source software projects. The bus factor measures how many contributors a project relies on for most of its development, highlighting potential risks in software sustainability.

Paper

The full research paper is available here: paper.md

Scripts

Included in this repo:

• busfactor.py – Calculates the bus factor from a GitHub repository.
• graphs.py – Generates example commit distribution and maintainer concentration graphs.

Images

• commit_distribution.png – Visual representation of commit distribution.
• maintainer_concentration.png – Visual representation of maintainer concentration.

For this paper, I used the example of numpy/numpy; a very popular Python library for numerical computing.

Requirements

Dependencies are listed in requirements.txt:

requests
matplotlib

Install them with:

pip install -r requirements.txt